• listen

Next week I will be leaving this glorious tiny island that has been my home for the past two years. On Wednesday I fly to Miami where I will pick up my two “Coconut Beach Retrievers” and drive them, my lovely partner Kendra, and all of our worldly possessions up to our new warehouse apartment in Baltimore MD.

It has been a really intense and rewarding experience living here the past two years. I have made incredible friends and have accomplished some really great things. When I first arrived I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. I had been working as a freelance photojournalist in the DC area and was pretty used to that lifestyle. All of the sudden things came to a crawl. I no longer had news assignments and the best I could hope for was the off chance that a hurricane would hit the island and I’d be able to sell a few images of the mess.

Well we did have a hurricane, but it was no big deal and I didn’t take many pictures. Somewhere along the way I got the idea that writing about photography might be interesting and so I started asking around. It was right around that time that Inside Aperture was launched and I became one of its first contributors. That was the beginning of a long journey to where I am now. From writing for IA, I have also created relationships with all sorts of photography people. I launched Aperture Plugged In to help create a resource for developers and users of plugins, and I started writing for the Aperture Users Professional Network. I also got into some software development and have been hard at work creating workflow solutions for a small handful of clients.

It really amazes me how much you can do remotely with just a laptop and an internet connection.

So, next week I begin the next chapter of my life. I am moving to a large studio space up in Baltimore which I will be calling my home for at least the next two years. In the fall I will begin work on my MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. That's right, Micah at MICA. This is something I have been dreaming of for years. I suppose I just now realized that I could in fact pull this off and go back to school full time.

One of the hardest questions I had to answer regarding the MFA was “why” I wanted to do it. I finished my undergrad work over 8 years ago and I have been in the “real world” ever since. So why would I want to go back to college life? Well, for me it was just one of those things that continued to call out to me.

So, I am really excited about what is to come. I also can’t wait to incorporate Aperture into my MFA work. I have launched a new website called Entropy Art that is designed to chronicle my two year experience at MICA. It is set up as a social networking site so that readers can really participate in the work I am doing and contribute. If you haven’t already done it, be sure to go over to EntropyArt.org and sign up.

Aperture is likely to play a key role in my MFA program. I will of course use it to archive, organize and edit all of the images I create, but I also have big plugin plans. A major component of my work is going to have to do with visualizing my imagery using software. You can read all about it at Entropy Art, but the gist of it is that I plan to create Aperture Edit plugins to do the work of processing my images.

I’m sure it will evolve over time, but I can already see a custom Aperture Edit plugin with a suite of processing algorithms that I can call at the click of a button. I can also see building in an interface where I can write my own scripts and apply them to the images right there in the plugin. That would really be something.

But don’t worry, I will continue to contribute to Inside Aperture on a regular basis during grad school. Of course, I will write a good deal about how Aperture is working for me in the classroom, and I am sure I will be evangelizing Aperture to my fellow classmates. But, there will be no more Aperture screen shots of images taken from my amazing view in the tropics, and no more Lightroom Vs. Aperture battles played out on the streets of Portsmouth during Carnival weekend. Well, I hate to say never.

So look forward to Aperture reporting from the streets of Baltimore. The next two years are sure to be an interesting ride.

The image above is of a 16"x20" painting that Kendra had commissioned for my last birthday. I just received it last night and I really love it. The image is of that amazing view I mentioned. Now I will be able to continue to enjoy it every morning, no matter where I am.