What is Distant Earth Studio?

Hey!

I’m Brett, and for the past two decades, I’ve been a professional photographer. I began my career in the wet darkroom working with silver and palladium, learning the principles of photographic printmaking. I’ve worked in this field long enough to switch from film to digital, leaving behind the smell of darkroom chemicals and the arcane shimmer of a silver print flickering to life in the developer bath for the quiet hum of an inkjet printer spitting out mural-sized photographic images. It’s a career built on an appreciation of light, composition of the frame, and the pursuit of visual perfection…not to mention a burgeoning camera bag addiction. (I’m recovering, but always tempted.)

Lately, I’ve wanted a way to step away from the viewfinder every so often and start working with ink, paper, and my hands again. That craving for the imperfect reality of handmade art is what led to the birth of Distant Earth Studio.

An Experiment in Creation

Distant Earth is where I experiment with analog creative freedom. After years of being constrained by what the camera sees, in this space I focus on the joy of creating something tangible from scratch.

So what will you find here? Oh, it will vary…wildly. My passions are science, nature, sci-fi, and fantasy. I love exploring distant galaxies, alien civilizations, the boundless realms of science and nature, and the kind of strange, fantastic mythologies that could only live in the mind’s eye.

Why ‘Distant Earth’?

The name, Distant Earth, ties all this together. It’s the idea — famously captured by Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” reflection — of looking back at our tiny planet from a vast distance, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” surrounded by a cosmos full of possibilities. This studio is where I turn those possibilities into something real.

Art for a Fictional Universe

Whether you look at recent theoretical physics suggesting we might be living in a simulation, or whether you just believe in the power of human imagination to realize its goals, I think a “Fictional Universe” is one where you can bring the things you imagine into reality. This studio is dedicated to exploring that space—the gap between our mind’s eye and the physical print.

I’m excited to translate a lifetime of visual experience into the raw, unpredictable world of handmade art. It’s going to messy and fun.