I can see you – even if I'm in a different zip code. So don't pick your nose.

On Friday the 13th (let's hope it's not a bad omen), I head to California to continue my current body of work photographing gold prospectors.  The last trip I made out to CA was to Southern California, but this time I'm headed North, to entirely new territory.

In prepping for a shooting trip, I always find it helpful to do a bit of research on the area.  Not just hotels and restaurants.  I mean the heavy stuff – the Google-Maps-Street-View-Satellite-Big-Brother type of research.  I have a pretty photographic memory, so it's always helpful to get a basic layout of each town in my head – a few landmarks – so I'm not totally clueless when I get there.

Tonight, as I toured these lands from afar, I started making screengrabs.  It started off with a visual "scavenger hunt" of shots I wanted to take, but became a rather interesting portfolio in its own right – complete with quirky visual artifacts resulting from the slow-loading process of our internet, as well as human and animal artifacts.  At the same time that they're visually appealing to look at, these details are also disturbing, as they reinforce the knowledge that we are always being watched.  Regardless, call these "teasers" of images I'll be posting a month from now...