Somewhere Between The Highway And Home

Nobody plans a trip to the stretch of highway between two towns most people have never heard of. That's the point. The best frame from any given month rarely comes from the destination — it comes from whatever happened on the two-lane road in between, when the plan was just to get home before dark.

Northern Nevada is mostly that in-between space. Long straightaways, a sky that does something different every twenty minutes, small towns that exist because a highway needed a gas station, and a horizon that never quite closes. It's not a place people typically photograph on purpose. It's a place people drive through on the way to somewhere else — Tahoe, Yosemite, a job in the next county over. Which makes it exactly the kind of place worth stopping for, because almost nobody does.

One frame that's ended up meaning more than most in this portfolio happened exactly that way: driving home, headlights on, no plan to shoot anything, when the sky did something the forecast hadn't mentioned. The choice in that moment is always the same — keep driving toward the bed you were already tired for, or pull onto the shoulder and lose twenty minutes you didn't plan to lose. The twenty minutes almost always wins, and it's never once been the wrong call.

This isn't really a story about landscapes. It's a story about paying attention to the ordinary parts of a job, the parts that don't make it into the brief. The commute between two client meetings. The waiting-around time on a shoot day before the light's ready. The version of a logo that got rejected on the way to the version that worked. Nobody hires a studio for the miles in between — they hire it for the finished story. But the finished story is usually built out of material that got noticed during the drive, not during the destination.

That's the whole case for Field Notes, honestly. The website holds the finished work. This is where the miles in between live.