Hello and Welcome

Hi, I’m Nick Wood.

I’ve been interested in photography since my mid teens. We were lucky enough to have a dark room at our high school, part of our Visual Communications curriculum (VisCom). In that dark room I developed my negatives, projected those negatives onto photo paper using tough old machines, dunked that paper into developer tubs, and watched as the blank photo paper transformed into the image I saw days earlier through a camera’s viewfinder. It was absolutely magical.

The process of seeking photos was and always has been my favorite part of photography. There’s at once a relaxation and hyper-connectedness to shooting photos for the love of the art. And the process of developing photos, whether in the dark room or in Lightroom, is such a pleasing time of reflection and creative expression.

One aspect of photography that I have struggled with lately is getting it out there, sharing it, and displaying it in a way that respects the value of the work. Like so many of us, I’ve been using Instagram for the majority of my photo sharing for the last few years. Instagram hasn’t always felt great, for a variety of reasons: there’s no real permanence, there’s limited options for display, and the limitations and constraints of the system cause me to shoot in specific ways. And of course, I have a healthy apprehension toward social networks these days, considering how they can be used at worst as a platform for manipulation and at best a platform to shovel ads in my face.

So, here I am with my own website. It’s been a long time coming. I plan to use this space in a variety of ways, as both a blog and a portfolio. I’ll use this space to combine my words and my images to tell stories of what’s happening in and around my life. This space will be somewhere I can point to and say, “that’s where I keep my art, and I would love for you to poke around.” I think it’s going to be a swell space and a good time.