I've always been surrounded by photography. My grandfather was a small-town professional photographer (he specialized in gauzy portraits of Gladiolus Festival Queens and beaming local brides). He had a shingle hung in front of his house with a big, garish, Gothic "B" on it announcing "Butterfield Photography," so I come by the name honestly. My great-uncle was an aerial photo analyst in WWII, and my father, not one to take retirement sitting down, is a photographer for a small suburban Chicago newspaper.

Relatives I never knew (this is probably a good thing), who lived somewhere behi...

I've always been surrounded by photography. My grandfather was a small-town professional photographer (he specialized in gauzy portraits of Gladiolus Festival Queens and beaming local brides). He had a shingle hung in front of his house with a big, garish, Gothic "B" on it announcing "Butterfield Photography," so I come by the name honestly. My great-uncle was an aerial photo analyst in WWII, and my father, not one to take retirement sitting down, is a photographer for a small suburban Chicago newspaper.

Relatives I never knew (this is probably a good thing), who lived somewhere behind the hills in Missouri, didn't have two rocks to pound together but seemed to have somehow managed to take pictures of their odd and craggy selves, and the places they referred to with astonishingly optimistic delusion as "farms." Those pictures are in my condo today (though I would prefer that their subjects stay as far away as possible).

Anyway, it's no surprise how I've gotten to this point.

I love photography. Call me a control freak, but I love looking at the world through a viewfinder, where it isolates the chaos into a manageable little rectangle I can control. I look for abstract patterns in detail, the "touchy-ness" of surfaces viewed so closely their "thingness" disappears; for bursts of rich color in expected and unexpected places; for textures and details.

At the same time, I love finding natural balance and symmetry in the bigness of the world: landscape views from airplane windows where the American Southwest transforms into an abstract painting, for instance; mountain ranges and rolling hills that interact with the sky.

And somewhere between there, portraits of the plants, animals, and people that live suspended between the micro and the macro.

For portrait work, I like to photograph people being comfortably themselves, even if they’re sitting under bright lights, in unnatural poses, wrapped in corporate chic or casual clothes or heavy chains, or even wearing very little at all.

I think my role is not just to capture the externals, but to find something of the person living in the back of each model’s head, so viewers can say not just “Oh he’s handsome,” but “I know this person.” Erotic and intimate photographs are made that much more erotic and intimate if there's some sense of a "person" behind the silk and skin. A headshot should convey more than "my nose looks like this."

My sittings are famously casual and nonthreatening, and I’ve been accused of being “fun” even in potentially awkward and uncomfortable situations. The fact is I like people almost as much as I like photography, and while a sitting may be a "business transaction," there's no reason why it can't be a pleasant experience for everyone involved.

This is all a fancy way of saying that I like taking pictures of stuff. I've set up this site as part of a midlife crisis project, with the encouragement of someone who was tired of hearing me complain. The photos here are mostly available for sale, download, or license, and if you have special requests about any of them, I'm sure we can work something out that will make everyone happy. For sale or not, the photos provide a good sample of what we could do together, you and I.

In real life, I'm a recovering attorney and Director of a technical nonprofit association. I live with my partner in Long Beach, California, and a cat who occasionally supervises photo sessions. My partner is the one who gave me my first Nikon, so all this is mostly his fault.

I'm available for contract work at embarrassingly reasonable rates, and I'm perfectly capable of traveling to you, within reason. Feel free to contact me about that, or about anything else you'd like to know or discuss; I'm relatively sane, generally friendly, and pretty chatty:

ebutterfieldphotography@gmail.com

Thanks for visiting this site, and for reading this longwinded meander.

Enjoy the pretty pictures.