RMPBS News
Capturing the ‘modern prairie’ with landscape photographer Alex Burke
1/22/2025 | 4m 12sVideo has Closed Captions
Capturing the ‘modern prairie’ with landscape photographer Alex Burke
Alex Burke began photographing in the grasslands of Weld County because they were close. Today, his photographs fuse natural and man-made elements in an effort to capture the beauty of local places. Produced by Cormac McCrimmon, Rocky Mountain PBS
RMPBS News is a local public television program presented by RMPBS
RMPBS News
Capturing the ‘modern prairie’ with landscape photographer Alex Burke
1/22/2025 | 4m 12sVideo has Closed Captions
Alex Burke began photographing in the grasslands of Weld County because they were close. Today, his photographs fuse natural and man-made elements in an effort to capture the beauty of local places. Produced by Cormac McCrimmon, Rocky Mountain PBS
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I think I'm an exposure sheet.
Film goes in the back.
I take out the dark slide.
So now the film is ready to be exposed.
I always block the sun from the lens shade here And that's that.
I grew up in Estes Park, which, you know, Mountain Town, always surrounded by nature, but I didn't really appreciate it all that much until I turned 18 and moved away.
I went to Phoenix to go to an automotive school, of there were a lot of evenings I would just go out into the deser just to get away from the city, my dad had this little digital camer he didn't really use it anymore.
So it was like some one megapixel digital camera, which he sent to me.
And it just got me, wanderin around the desert taking photos.
Look And this is what they call.
It's a slide film.
So the image is actually look in full color.
So this is some in Alaska here.
So that's what slide film looks like.
Negative film is a little bit messier.
Negative film looks like this orange brown stuff.
And this is what you would use to make prints with, directly from the darkroom.
And you then invert the file after scanning it.
So there's actually a full color image here.
It just looks like a orange brow mass, this is a sunrise light.
You can hardly tell in this looking at the negative, but this is just about soft pinks and reds in the sky in a grain elevator.
And just a The plains kind of came to me because, well, I was living in Greeley, and sometimes you don't want to drive a whole day or many hour to find something to photograph.
it started just kind of adding those manmade elements into my photography, a field that's cultivated o a fence running in a rural area, I love the solitude of the prairie.
It's not a travel destination.
You're not going to find, you know, wanderlust articles about it.
It's just kind of its own It's the middle of the country.
It's, forgotten by a lot of people.
They call it flyover states.
You Anyone who's been in Colorado for any amount of time knows that we're growing quickly, and that growth starts in the cities and it works its way all over.
I've watched homesteads fal apart there is that kind of rush to get out and document things before they disappear.
when I go out for a shoot, I might set up the camera and be like, the light's not working, this isn't going to do it, and I'm not going to burn a sheet of film.
It's not inexpensive at all.
So I might just pack it up and leave.
Or if the sunset is really good or something's happening, the light keeps changing.
I might take 1 to 3, maybe even four photographs as the light progresses.
that's probably the biggest like challenge and frustration is the amount of time I don't create something.
So now I've got everything from nea to far and pretty sharp focus.
And then I just stop the lens down Yeah.
I'll shoot when it gets below that next gap.
a big part of photographing locally is you just get this new appreciation for, the way your own area looks.
everywhere that people live, there is beauty around.
So even if all you have is these deep forests around you, there's beauty there.
If all you have is ope prairie, there's beauty there.
If you're in the mountains, well, lucky you, there's always something beautiful around you
RMPBS News is a local public television program presented by RMPBS