A Profession Constructed By Remark And Curiosity

Mike Shipman’s pictures first caught my eye 20 years in the past once I purchased an Idaho Capitol rotunda picture that also hangs in my workplace. Two many years and one in all his courses later, I’ve come to acknowledge what makes his work final. As knowledgeable photographer, artist, and teacher, Mike has a method of showing the world in entrance of us, and the broader one round us.

Mike’s curiosity in pictures started in a ninth grade pictures class. His formal training and first profession had been in wildlife biology. With a level from Colorado State University and after attending the Raptor Biology graduate program at Boise State University, he labored for federal companies after which for MicronPC as a customization coordinator.

In 2004, Mike made the transfer to full-time pictures as a result of he needed to be an entrepreneur. Mike shares: “I had an opportunity to open my own studio in Nampa and by then I was defiant enough, maybe courageous enough, and I decided to take the opportunity and see where it led. I quit my job, rented a 1,200 sq ft warehouse space a couple months later, and moved in. At my studio I taught classes, did product photography, corporate headshots, and personal work until 2007 when the recession hit.”

Now he works from dwelling. “It’s great but somewhat limiting,” he says. “I miss the space I had in my studio but not the overhead. I’ve worked around that by turning my garage into a studio. I concentrate mostly on fine art photography and teaching these days, with a few commercial and editorial assignments here and there. I’ve also branched out into other art forms like bookbinding, linocut printing, and stenciling (pochoir).”

Mike has been an Idaho Commission on the Arts Teaching Artist since 2010, one of many sudden instructions his pictures profession has taken him. That expertise has led him to serve on the advisory boards of the Timberline High School and College of Western Idaho Commercial Technical Education pictures applications.

Photography is “a way of life that engages and expands awareness and reveals interconnections between seemingly unrelated things,” says Mike. That perception is what brings his explorations to life by way of his lens, and into pictures we get to get pleasure from.

Mike displays his pictures on the Art Source Gallery, in Boise. His web site: www.blueplanetphoto.com