About Brad
Welcome! My name is Brad Mitchell. I am a Washington State based photographer and writer specializing in outdoor adventure, travel and natural history of Washington State, the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
As a lifetime resident of Washington State, I continue to develop my connection with nature, a connection that continues to shape my thinking and my way of life. As a child, I grew up exploring the beaches and woods around our home on Whidbey Island. Later, the mountains called me to climb their summits and ski their wintry back-country slopes. Today, I am drawn to long wilderness adventures of all sorts, or simply to loosing myself in local forests. More recently, I have been inspired to explore the desert landscapes of eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and of the American Southwest. In the desert, it's easier to see how billions of years of geological transformation have shaped our planet and led to its incredible variety of life. Now, I look up into the night-time sky and wonder about what’s going on out there on other planets.
My art is inspired by a deep curiosity for the stories found in geology, biodiversity and the Universe. My art will always be a work in progress. Please browse my prints and see whether there is something that you can connect with, and that inspires you to showcase a bit of nature’s amazing work on the walls of your home or office.
Please feel free to contact me, and let’s stay connected via Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or Instagram.
Thank you for visiting today!
Artistic Philosophy
In respect of nature's own wondrous creative art, I strive to represent its landscapes and wildlife with the highest technical standards of image capture, image processing, printing and presentation. However, to share my personal experience with the subject in the field, and to express my personal artistic vision in the format of fine art photography, I must make many intentional and personal choices. These choices include selection of lens focal length, image aspect ratio, composition, optical filters, depth of field, when to trigger an exposure with respect to available light and subject position/motion, duration of exposure and camera movement. My editing choices may include color balance, contrast adjustment, minor cloning and image sharpening. Printing and presentation choices include selection of paper/media, mat, frame and lighting. To overcome limitations in optics and camera technology, I may also choose to composite multiple images to capture a necessary depth-of-field, field-of-view or range of exposure. All of these personal choices are made with humble respect to both the subject and to my personal experience and vision as a creative artist.
I do not composite images together to generate scenes that do not exist in the real world. I do not add clouds or fog or beams of light that did not exist, even if it’s possible that they could exist at some other time. I do not swap out skies. I do not remove significant objects in the scene. I do not stretch or alter the geometry of any part of a scene, other than to correct very minor perspective distortions or pincushion/barrel distortion created by imperfect optics.