Photographs of Telluride and the surrounding San Juan Mountains, capturing alpine trails, wildflowers, winter terrain, festivals, music and life around town.
Telluride is surrounded by an extraordinary amount of country to explore and photograph. The San Juan Mountains change constantly with the seasons and weather. Summer brings wildflowers and afternoon storms, autumn turns the aspens gold, and winter transforms the surrounding terrain. In town, events such as the Telluride Mushroom Festival and Telluride Bluegrass Festival provide a very different view of the place.
Most of the photographs on this site were taken with a mid-range point-and-shoot camera or a Samsung Galaxy phone. That’s partly practical. A small camera is easy to carry while hiking an alpine trail, skiing the Telluride Ski Area, or wandering around a festival. The camera that’s with you when something happens is often more useful than the better one left at home.
I sometimes call my approach “brute-force photography”: find an interesting place or subject, take a lot of photographs, and see what emerges. Around Telluride, that works surprisingly well. Light moves across the mountains, clouds build quickly, and rainbows can appear and disappear in minutes. Even a familiar view can suddenly look completely different. A lot of the photographs collected here came from simply being there when that happened.