My favorite style of photo to take is the macro type. There’s something magical about close detail, and bringing it to life with a lens. Not that broad landscapes aren’t beautiful, but it’s the small moments I like. The fuzzy components, the texture, the closeness. Here are a collection of macro images I’ve taken in the last year.

I recently had a brief trip to the Yucatán, to the eastern-most Mexican state of Quintana Roo. It’s a sun-drenched part of the world, humid and lush, with a feel of history all around you. Traveling with a Mexican friend who knew the area, we explored some of the best food the peninsula had to offer, but also took in some of the ruins that the mighty Mayan civilization left for us to discover. The ruins of Coba were one of the sites we explored, and I even climbed the steep stone steps of Nohoch Mul pyramid to get an amazing view of the dense forests.

The weather was sweltering, slowing down the exploration of these beautiful rock ruins, bleached brightly by hundreds of years of sun. But I did manage to climb Nohoch Mul, which was much steeper and more precarious than I was hoping for such a hot day. By the time I got to the top, vertigo and fatigue nearly made me fall down the 138 feet stone pyramid.  Once down on solid ground, it was fascinating to stroll through the various remains of this ancient city that once held 50,000 people.  The ballgame courts felt like an ancient racquetball hangout spot, and wished they were somehow still in use.  And the Mayan civilization’s calendar that predicted 2012 was the end of the world rung through my head. I figured it was good to pay my respects while I still had the chance.

Coba Ruins // Quitana Roo // Mexico from Benjamin VanderVeen on Vimeo.

He’s a Pembroke Welsh Corgi pup, and a great guy. As a lifelong dog lover, it’s been on my list for the last several years to get another dog. And after my mom recently came to Portland to visit, she convinced me that now is as good a time as ever!  Louie is currently 3 months old and still figuring out how to walk on a leash and learn some basic commands. But he’s bright and energetic, and man-oh-man does he get compliments. Already a neighborhood favorite, Louie is a true crowd pleaser.

Louie hanging out in the grass. A quick learn, he already is getting the hang of fetching. Hoping he’s a frisbee dog someday!

Look out for lots more posts about Louie and our adventures together!

Another year gone by, we step into the future. As a videographer, I take a lot of footage throughout the year, and one perplexing question that results is: What to do with all of that video? A simple Year in Review, that’s what. Minimal editing, just a mix of shots and places and people and adventure.

And here is Year in Review from 2010. I hope to make this a running tradition. I imagine my Year In Review 2045 will be a little more tame…

In an age of crowdsourcing, freelancing, contracting and multi-tasking, it’s easy to feel like you’re juggling multiple careers. I often feel this way, and wonder how it affects me.  From a personal standpoint, the hard thing about narrowing down my own path has been my interest in so many diverging industries.  As a kid I wanted to be a vet and a doctor and a filmmaker and a writer.  Today, I want to be twice that many things.  Unlike a more pragmatic person, I want to dabble. And explore. And enter new arenas.

On the plus side, each day can be a new adventure. A life of too much repetition sounds pretty unfortunate, and perhaps an innate fear of this has kept me agile.  On the down side, uncertainty, apprehension and anxiety are always lurking. Charting your own course is a risk.  It’s like the safety net has been removed.

But is perhaps the ‘danger’ part of the draw? Is the decision to not make a final decision? Can you master a number of career choices without losing yourself? I guess I’m figuring that out.

In the interim, I call myself a designer. The term is accurate, though the term is also broad, which helps.  In the last several years I’ve worn a variety of hats, and grown to like a whole lot about different areas of design.  Working with printers? Interesting (and a little frustrating). Being an online contributor/editor? Fast-paced, fun, and goofy.  Logo designer? Impactful, thought-provoking, exciting. Videographer? A feeling of importance, also a feeling of anxiety, making sure your equipment is all working properly.  All together, it makes for a multi-faceted schedule, and has made me feel well-rounded.  The flipside to that is my reluctance to call myself an expert in one particular field.

That said, who am I? A generalist? A man of many stripes?  We’re going to have to find out together.

Through all of this tragedy, I was incredibly moved by the strange and powerful photographs from Richard Mosse. I hope this brilliant and bizarre exhibit can help to draw attention to the heart of Africa.  Via Coolhunting:

As pro-am DSLRs and post production software make photography increasingly accessible, photographer Richard Mosse seems set on making his life more difficult. Armed with dead-stock Kodak infrared film—originally developed to detect camouflage for military aerial surveillance—Mosse ventured into the heart of the Congo to take some pictures. The forty-year-old technology was a cumbersome addition to his rural exploration, with Mosse playing the role of a time-traveling photographer under the hood of his camera. Consciously drawing from the photojournalistic tradition, Mosse’s collection “Infra,” on display at NYC’s Jack Shainman Gallery through 23 December, is a revisitation of familiar themes. He plays a dangerous game, trying to imbue life into themes so commonplace that viewers have become apathetic. The result is a new meditation on the problematic genre of photojournalism in regions plagued by conflict, one that uses art to decontextualize the familiar.

The obvious narrative is simple. Hardened rebels stand among expanses of eye-popping magenta, a comic irony that contradicts the gravity of war. Mosse is using a discontinued technology to revisit an old yet ongoing problem, creating a dialogue between the generations of inhabitants affected by war and the omnipresent lens of western civilization. “Infra” forces the viewer to look with fresh eyes at images to which they have become blind. This experience holds true not only for viewers, but for Mosse as well. Without the perspective of his camera’s infrared film, Mosse experienced his subjects for the first time during development.

Beyond the political ramifications of his work, Mosse’s images are compositionally stunning. His ability to find geometry in figures and landscapes is especially apparent in infrared, where the contours of trails and human limbs soberly interrupt the mass of color. While child soldiers supply the initial interest, Mosse’s landscapes are the surprise pleasure of the exhibition. Vegetation gives off a high amount of infrared light, which makes the Congo’s lush terrain a particularly gorgeous subject for Mosse’s lens. A stunning 3×3 series showcases the fragile structures of the Congo, lending valuable insight into village life.

On Thursday, November 10th, President Obama decided to send the massive Keystone XL pipeline project back to the drawing board. He delayed any decision-making on the project for at least two years, effectively killing it. Most experts agree that the pipeline will never be able to meet the strict zoning, environmental and health requirements that it would need.

This is great news. Despite what some say, the project, at a generous maximum, would have created 20,000 jobs, with the State Department saying it is more like 5-6,000 temporary jobs. And for what? The world’s dirtiest oil, scraped laboriously out of the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and pumped thousands of miles across vital farmland and aquifers of the United States.

All of this seemed sadly inevitable up until the last few months, as rich oil interests used their influence to push the project forward. Indeed, I began to think it a foregone conclusion, judging by President Obama’s less-than-stellar record on the environment. But then something miraculous happened. People from around the country began to wake up, and realize that more dirty oil is not the answer to our problems. Despite it coming from North America, the risks of pumping millions of gallons of crude through above-ground pipes across huge groundwater aquifers was just asking for trouble. And this is not taking into account the massively carbon-intensive practice of extracting bitumen, a semi-solid, molasses-like substance. Worse still, this oil sand extraction would come from Alberta, a wild and gorgeous part of Canada known for snowcapped peaks and clean air. I drove through much of Alberta this summer, and the thought of massive, open-pit surface mining scarring the surfaces of this land is painful.

Me with my parents in Alberta, Canada.

Just in time, Americans began to wake up and smell the awful reality headed their way. They began forming coalitions, planning marches, and demonstrating outside the White House, to reinforce their message.

Bill McKibben, a prominent environmentalist and author, became the defacto spokesman against the Keystone XL project. His 350.org movement helped to plan gatherings, marches and sit-ins, and just last week, the movement brought more than 10,000 people together, to encircle the White House and pledge their opposition to the pipeline. They circled it three-people-deep, and brought banners with Obama’s own election quotes about ending the tyranny of oil, and healing our planet.

They seem to have won. With the White House’s decision on Thursday, Obama sent a message that civil action does matter, and coming from a former community-organizer himself, that is praise.

While this is a major victory, the next steps may indeed be the harder ones. They require a forward-looking plan that makes sense on a multitude of levels. Focusing on positive job growth through smart industries like renewables, technology, advanced engineering and design. Realizing that we do live in an oil-based economy, but that the sooner we change that, the better. Reinvigorating our universities to train the next generation of geniuses, thinking big about our energy future, and convincing an ever-skeptical public that protecting the environment is in everyone’s best interest.

For some background, I began my foray into Mac computers relatively late in life, when my sister got her G3 tower. I had regarded Apple as an interesting, quirky alternative to PCs until I saw this gorgeously designed machine, complete with a futuristic flat panel display (rare indeed in 1999). Soon thereafter, I was struck with the “Apple bug”, and began following the ins and outs of the company, and their charismatic CEO, Steve Jobs. Here was a man who valued quality and aesthetics, but in a deep-rooted, inherent way. He was the anti-CEO, someone more likely to bleed the company of money, making quality things rather than release shoddy merchandise. I even studied design in college in part to the inspiration Apple, and Steve Jobs gave me.

There have been countless memorials and articles in the last few days extolling Jobs as a true renaissance man, a genius, a visionary and a cultural leader. I won’t attempt to regurgitate all of that, but I did want to share my reflection on the passing of perhaps America’s greatest business leader.

Undoubtedly, Steve Jobs was able to command respect through his huge string of technological hits. In the iPod explosion of the 2000s, even the most ardent critics had to admit he and Apple had a knack for innovation. Bill Gates has never been very eloquent, and in the light of Windows’ many copycat flounders, he seemed to be personally ticked off and embarrassed that the born-again Apple that he saved from bankruptcy was now on a surge.   The surge hasn’t slowed, and Apple this August briefly edged out Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company in the world.

But company valuation and market share weren’t Steve Jobs’ obsessions.  The company he founded was never purely about profit. It was about creating products that Steve himself would be proud to use.  He recruited the best industrial designers in the business, and pushed them and pushed them until they sweat innovation out their pores.  While competition used the rubric of technical specs, Jobs molded Apple into a company with few peers and no regard for conventional comparison.  True, Apple isn’t always the fastest or first to implement a technology.  But when at their best, Apple’s offerings are cut from a totally different cloth.  Like building a phone out of aluminum and glass. Like building a computer without a fan to make it silent and calming. Like creating a giant glass cube in Manhattan that beckons visitors into its store.

To me, this type of innovation and conscious differentiation is what made Steve Jobs important. It elevates the whole world of technology into one of art and beauty.

In Jobs’ own words:

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities.

In this way, his approach was one of societal inclusion in technology. His mission was to understand technology and have a vision for where and how it fit into human culture.   It’s easy to be flippant and trivialize the “i” devices as just more stuff. And I do see the consumerism, here-today-gone-tomorrow aspect of it.  And surely Jobs was guilty as anyone for giving us a sweet tooth for pretty shiny objects. But I see his role as fundamental in evolving the way we communicate, create, design and flourish.  No doubt that the computer would have evolved without Steve Jobs. But I don’t want to picture what it would look like without him.  He brought a beautifully humanistic and soulful influence that can’t be overstated.  In my travels overseas, Apple products are the envy of everyone, and it made me proud to call Steve Jobs an American.  He was the great innovator. A legend.

You were a huge inspiration to me, Steve. I am going to miss you a lot.