Indie Spotlight: Aaron Wilson

Each Monday, we’ll highlight one indie photographer whose body of work deserves special recognition. Please enjoy their photography here, and make it a point to enjoy the rest of their work on their website.

This week our Indie Spotlightee is the January FYP/500px Photography Contest winner and he is not your average photographer. Using an off-the-shelf point and shoot camera, he takes brilliant shots without any pre-setup – a natural composer if I may say so. Allow me to introduce you to Aaron Wilson.

Aaron is one of the few talented amateur photographer who experiments with various methods and techniques of taking a good photograph. Hailing from Moorpark, California, Aaron shoots most of his images during family vacations and describes them all as ‘opportunistic shots’ taken via his pro-sumer Canon PowerShot SX1 IS coupled with an adapted polarized filter on its fixed lens (28-560mm equivalent lens at 4:3 aspect ratio) to filter out glare as many of his shots are taken outdoors.

As Aaron says “Most of my photos are opportunistic, shot in natural light without any pre-thought out setup.” Aaron may call his shots opportunistic, but I call him a natural composer — being easily able to visualize what he wants and how he wants his shot to look without having to plan ahead.

Aaron doesn’t believe in limiting one’s self to only shoot a few shots on specific subjects at any given time during an outing. Taking multiple shots of each subject may fill his memory card with hundreds if not thousands of photos by the end of every outing as he prefers to shoot in JPEG, occasionally RAW when he has the time to setup his camera for a specific shot but that is how likes it. He will go through each photo to remove any “bad shots” before sorting through the rest for what he feels has the right amount of “power” to them.

He doesn’t follow nor have any specific post production task — which is why his photos are unique. Having experience in doing graphic work for websites and magazines, Aaron prefers to use the Photoshop Creative Suite to cleanup artifacts or intrusions whenever he decided to process them.

Ever since Aaron bought his iPad last year, he has been playing around with numerous editing apps for iPad. There are hundreds of photo editing apps that have the ability to quickly edit photos, apply special effects, and/or manipulate photos in some weird yet wonderful and fun ways. Having tried numerous editing apps before, he found only a select few that do the job to his liking. Filterstorm Pro ($14.99), Snapseed ($4.99), Photopad (FREE) and PhotoStudio HD ($1.99). Coupled with a special stylus for the iPad, he found the iPad to be an amazing platform for photo editing and filters.

Aaron takes special interest in a unique type of photography called Urban Decay or Urban Exploration. Urban decay, according to Wikipedia, is the process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair, and decrepitude.

He captures these “fallen” landscapes to conceptualize man made “ruins” as a sign of a previously inhabited existence. The rawness of the abandoned buildings, colors of rusted metal, graffiti, and mother nature reclaiming the entire city, or part of it, caught his attention. Given the chance, he would love to fly to Russia just so he can explore every cold war factory and building ruins.

Ansel Adams’ work in nature photography has become Aaron’s inspiration to go do more and go further. Although he doesn’t have any specific Urban Decay or Exploration photographer that he calls his favorite, he admires their courage in taking the risks and the patience in scouting for that perfect location just to get the shots.

Being an off-road racer by day (or when he’s not taking pictures), he would like to have the chance to explore specialized equipment photography and capture high speed shots of auto sports as the high adrenaline of being able to capture a fast moving object on still photos. “It truly captures what it feels like when time slows down to the driver.”

Aaron is also the editor for Toy Hauler Adventures, an online magazine dedicated specifically to help showcase the toy hauler lifestyle, active in several other off-road racing forums like Raze Dezert, and Class 3000 Racing. You can catch Aaron offline when he’s racing or speculating at many off-road races, including the upcoming MINT 400 in March, or roaming around the deserts and mountains of Southern California looking for shots.