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GVNC: What is your medium?

Iknoian: I am a fine art photographer specializing in night photography, travel, people-watching and observing life as it happens around me. My real passion is creating night images with dark skies, stars, abandoned places, and light painting. I often head out on solo road trips to indulge in creating my art. 

GVNC: At what point in your life did you realize your calling?

Iknoian: As a journalism major I also studied photography, but my newspaper and magazine career focused solely on writing (I was also a member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper news team). I turned back to the photographic process later in life as a part of the HI Travel Tales travel blog I run with my husband, but I only discovered the inspiring creative challenges of night photography about eight years ago.

GVNC: Tell us about your creative process.

Iknoian: I find myself staring at things a lot -- circling and considering angles, analyzing sun and moon rises and sets, as well as light pollution, and how lights placed in and around something will appear in a photo. If everybody in the world wants a certain shot, I don’t. I want something different, which could also be an entirely different angle of The Photo everybody wants. I plan, plot and ponder. The other kind of process I have that is adrenaline-filled is the total opposite and based on spontaneity -- capturing life and people as it all happens, at events or on the street, which likely stems from my journalism news reporting background.

GVNC: What inspires you?

Iknoian: Sitting under the night skies in a remote spot, alone, listening to the quiet and refueling my soul.

GVNC: What are you most proud of?

Iknoian: Developing this passion successfully at, dare I say it, “a certain age,” as they call it so deliciously in French.

GVNC: What do you love best about our creative community?

Iknoian: It is always surprising how much talent there is in the foothills! And everybody is so willing to support and share as well as applaud others’ successes.