About Shadowed Hills

Hi. My name’s Ken, welcome to my photo blog. Photography is a hobby I keep coming back to. This time around I decided to try sharing my work online as a way to motivate myself. I’m strictly an amateur, and despite having been at this for a while, not a particularly polished one. My goal is to make the photos I share here more than simple snapshots, and to learn something in the process of doing that. My plan is to post weekly, on Fridays, but that sometimes gets delayed into the weekend due to “Life”. And normally I’m posting a photo from the previous weekend, or at worst some recent weekend, although I’ll dip deeper into my library if I don’t have anything recent that I consider suitable.

Weekly posting of recent photos is in part meant to keep me motivated to get out nearly every weekend with my camera, looking for potential scenes to capture and getting some exercise and fresh air in the process. That’s less pleasant in midwinter or high summer than at other times, but so far I’ve managed to keep at it, even at overly cold or hot times.

I like to photograph the world as it’s shaped by human activity. Buildings, structures, and machinery are fair game. I live in New England, and most of my photographs will reflect that. The central theme of my photographs is human influence on the landscape, although I define that rather broadly. For me, this isn’t just “Landscape Photography”, although it’s strongly related to that discipline.

The name of the blog, Shadowed Hills, reflects how I see New England: still surprisingly wild despite nearly four hundred years of city-building, and always ready to reclaim the land from humanity when we turn our backs. In the late afternoon, as the shadows lengthen and the valleys grow dark, there’s a Lovecraftian sense that the land is just biding its time until it can reclaim what we’ve taken. It’s also a play on words, as to “shadow” something is to follow it surreptitiously, and I’m stalking the inanimate.

If you are curious about the photo at the top of the blog, which changes when the mood strikes me, seach on the word “banner” for posts describing the current and past images.