If you’re going to read just one of my blog posts about photography, this is it.

A year ago, I left my job as a software engineer to explore what it would be like to do Landscape Photography full time. Would I ever get good enough? Would I still enjoy it if I did it full time? Would I want to attempt to make a living as an artist?

The answer was, as usual, complicated.

Part of my reason for taking a year to focus on landscape photography full time was to figure out where I want to settle down. I came to Seattle in 2014 after researching all of the cities in the US, but a lot has changed since then.

I was looking for a small-medium size city with good access to beautiful nature and all the other things you might expect a hiker nerd to enjoy. It has certainly lived up to those expectations and is absolutely one of the most beautiful corners of the world, but…is it still the right place for me?

If you’re also trying to figure out where to settle down and Seattle is on your radar, read on.

A photographic journey through the first days of Winter in Sweden

As people are becoming increasingly concerned about the growing power of big tech, many are leaving existing messaging platforms for ones that are focused on privacy and security. Recently there was a wave of people fleeing to a particular messenger called Signal, used for a long time by Edward Snowden and others who care about privacy.

We don’t know if Elon Musk was part of this wave, but he did send out a tweet — "Use Signal." Signal was developed by a non-profit, so you can't invest in it on the stock market. Yet, the shares of an unrelated company, Signal Advance, soared in the days following Elon’s tweet.

I write this as I procrastinate on editing one of the most incredible scenes I've ever witnessed. It's been days now and I am struggling with even choosing which take is best.

I first went to this location during the evening to scout for compositions. I walked around with my camera for an hour at least, then uploaded the images to Lightroom, did some rough edits, and found the best angles and foreground elements. That alone was a lot of choices that had to be made. Does it look better with the camera low to the ground? Medium height? High up? An inch to the left? The right? One of the infinite number of options in-between?

I started photography to share the beautiful things I see when I'm out in nature. The focus was initially on being in nature, and the camera just happened to come along.

Over time, the desire to make good images became a bigger and bigger priority. It took many years, but trips began to be centered around photography. Evenings playing around with sliders in Camera Raw became days of careful painting selective adjustments in Photoshop. A scene that was once filled with the joy of exploration and being out in the wilderness became not good enough to win any awards or get re-posted by any feature accounts on Instagram, and therefore not worth witnessing.