The Creative Path of Benjamin Everett

I first met Benjamin in 2016 on the North Shore of Kauai, where he was living at the time. I had been following him on Instagram, and asked if he wanted to meet up while I was photographing on the island. We photographed along the beach at sunset, had dinner together and spent time talking about our approaches to photography. Since that day, we have continued to communicate and share our philosophies.

Benjamin's photograph from White Pocket, in northern Arizona, was one of his early images on Instagram that first caught my attention—long before this area became a popular place for landscape and nightscape photographers.

I continued to follow the nightscapes he was posting from his North Shore home on Kauai...

I also noticed that he was having a lot of fun photographing daytime subjects on the island, and he was good at it—whether it was above the water, or under it...

Shortly after our meeting, Benjamin moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he continued his style of photography in that beautiful location...

But it was when Benjamin won the prestigious Hasselblad Masters Award for Landscape/Nature that I began to notice major shifts in his approach to his art. In retrospect, these latent talents were always there, but now they were beginning to blossom.

A series of ski racing injuries turned his interest towards art with deeper conviction. Drawing and painting made long periods of immobility more meaningful. Later on, meditation became another way to access many of the same emotional experiences that adventures in the physical world provided. Alternating between periods of mobility and immobility, Everett used the camera in the field and digital painting techniques in the studio as a way to combine both inner and outer experiences.

Although my focus in this spotlight on Benjamin Everett has moved away from nightscape photography, which is the theme of my Patreon, there is much that Benjamin has taught me, and that I hope I can incorporate in my own photography.

I tend to be quite rigid sometimes in my photography, because I'm trying to be honest and truthful in what I'm recording—so much that I do not allow my creative vision and my emotions to carry over into my work. I don't think there is anything wrong with combining your images to create art as Benjamin has done—as long as it is totally your work and it is shown as art and not as traditional photography.

Here's one of Benjamin's latest Instagram posts that might inspire you to allow yourself think and create beyond what you've done in the past: