Talking with Rusty Hamilton
Hey folks! Welcome back to this brand new Inside the Photo! It’s always such a pleasure for me to reach out to fellow photographers and propose this collaboration. There are plenty of things to show and stories to tell. Each of us has had that moment in life when, even before pressing the shutter, we knew we weren’t just grabbing an image. We were saving a story. And that’s exactly what I want to explore in this series.
Today’s guest is my friend Rusty. Here is more about him.
As a late teenager on my own in the mid-nineties, I got caught up in the care of reptiles and tarantulas. Their strange beauty fascinated me, and I wanted a way to keep it. A small group of friends who shared the same unusual hobby took me in. One of them was a photographer who encouraged me to pick up a camera. He sold me a Minolta film body and a pile of lenses, and that was enough. The seed was planted.
The camera wasn’t fully functional—some of the sensors were flaky—so I jumped in the deep end and learned to shoot in manual. The Minolta and I had a good run until the day I got engaged and fell in the river, camera and all. But that’s another story.
I have since retired the reptiles. These days I share photography with my wife. We discovered our love for landscapes on an anniversary trip to Scotland, and it has been the main subject ever since.
Many years, moves, and cameras later, I found myself living in West Texas. From there the map opens: New Mexico, Arizona, Utah—country that photographs itself if you give it time. I like getting in the Jeep and taking a road trip, off-road included, to out-of-the-way places with only a loose itinerary and a spirit of adventure. Some of the places that stay with me are the Bisti Badlands in northern New Mexico; North and South Coyote Buttes, White Pocket, and Antelope Canyon in northern Arizona; and just about anywhere in southern Utah.
I shoot landscapes most of the time, and I occasionally wander into macro and the night sky. Landscapes show what’s clearly there. The other work is about seeing what you usually miss—the pattern on a butterfly wing, or the colors in a distant galaxy.
A few years ago I told a friend from the old reptile group that I needed an outlet for my photography. She told me to take it to the web. I built a site, filled it with galleries spanning decades of work, and last year turned it into a business: Rusty Hamilton Photography. It isn’t a full-time gig. By trade I am a mechanical engineer, and I spend my days running a 3D mechanical design business. I’ve found a way to blend the two by 3D-printing photographs as lithophanes. A lithophane doesn’t look like much until light passes through it. Then it comes alive as a high-resolution black-and-white image.
I’m always looking for new ways to see, and another place that isn’t on the itinerary. The best part is still introducing someone to a place they’ve never been and letting them experience it for themselves. The rest is what it’s always been: capturing the world as I see it, one frame at a time.
Rusty’s work is exactly the reflection of this constant search for a new place, a new story, a new landscape. Nature, in all its beauty, is the real star of his work. An excellent work. You can spend hours looking at his images and in the end still wanting more. Being a portrait photographer, I love to travel around the world through the images of talented photographers.
© Rusty Hamilton
There’s not much in West Texas but dust and oil rigs, so if my wife and I want something nicer to look at, we point the Jeep at the horizon and give it three hours, sometimes six. New Mexico is the next state over, and a lot of the scenery that draws us lives there. We live for those day trips and weekend getaways.
In late November 2019 we were in Albuquerque when the high country had just taken a fresh coat of snow. From town you can see Sandia Peak standing over the city like a wall, and that day the Crest was white. We looked at each other and decided we had to investigate.
The road up to the Crest is a long, twisting climb with snow packed into the curves and steep drops at the shoulders. I suspect I enjoyed it more than my passenger did. By the time we parked, the air had that thin winter bite you only get when you’ve left the desert floor a mile below you. The view from the summit was extraordinary. The sun above was clear and bright while the city below had nearly disappeared under a lid of cloud.
We walked the ridge and tried to take it all in: the clouds at our feet, a drop that just keeps going, snow loaded onto every branch until the trees looked carved. Then we noticed a trail slipping behind the trees, running parallel to the ridge. The official view was the one in front of us, but this one hadn’t been offered. Again, we had to investigate.
The path was quiet. Snow muffled the steps. Every so often the trees would thin and you’d get a slash of blue, then close up again. After a while there was a real opening—an arch the snow had made of the branches—and through it the whole drop presented itself at once. Sun at the top of the gap. Clouds laid out like a floor. Mountains and the faint suggestion of the valley beyond that, then the long pale line of the horizon.
I didn’t have the Nikon, but I had the phone in my pocket. I put the sun in the notch the trees had left, let the snow-heavy limbs do the framing, and captured the moment.
I like a photograph you can walk through. That’s why this one stayed. First the trees, close enough to feel the cold coming off them. Then the weather sitting just under your feet. Then the country beyond it, going on farther than the frame can hold. Same mountain, same opening, and it would be a different photograph on a different day. The trees have probably closed the gap by now. I’m just glad I was there at the time to pocket the memory.
The mindset of the explorer and the storyteller is always about going off path and looking for different points of view. And this can lead to incredible results or just to a waste of time. Truth is you don’t know if you don’t try. This image is amazing and, to me, represents the motivation that moves Rusty to always move towards new adventures.
As always, here you can find the links to join Rusty’s travels. I’m sure you’ll find them incredible.
Thanks a lot for being with us and taking us with you to this wonderful place, Rusty!
Take care and talk soon!