When a Thoughtful Eye Meets the Work

A meaningful moment for me: Ted Forbes of The Art of Photography features Days to Live: An Aerial Perspective

There are certain people whose attention carries a particular weight, not because they are loud, but because they have spent years looking carefully. Ted Forbes is one of those people.

Through his Youtube channel, The Art of Photography, he has helped shape how many photographers think about images, books, and visual language. So it meant a great deal to me to see him feature and discuss my photobook, Days to Live: An Aerial Perspective.

I was especially moved that he connected with the abstract nature of the work, because that was always part of the deeper invitation of this book: not simply to look at landscape, but to enter it differently, through pattern, emotion, memory, and altitude.

I’m sharing the video below for those who’d like to watch. The section on the book starts at 2:14 and runs for 3 minutes.

I’m deeply grateful for the generosity and care he brought to the work.

:: Rand

For new subscribers, firstly welcome! Secondly, Days to Live: An Aerial Perspective was published in 2025 and is available on Amazon.

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Here is the video transcript of Ted’s coverage of the book:

It’s wonderfully abstract. It’s extremely beautiful and it’s also very personal note because Rand is a heart transplant survivor.

I’m going to read you the preface in here because I think this will give you a little bit of context. He writes, “Life, like the landscapes we inhabit, is both vast and fragile. From above, the world reveals its intricate patterns and textures, its infinite beauty, and undeniable impermanence. This aerial perspective captured the sweeping vistas of Shark Bay, Western Australia, provides a lens through which to view not only the Earth, but also the journey of the human spirit. It is this duality, fragility, and resilience that lies in the heart of the book. I present it to you as a deeply personal reflection on survival, transformation, and the power of renewal. Being a heart transplant survivor, I know intimately the profound gift of a second chance. These pages combine two perspectives. the ethereal aerial images that symbolize freedom and perspective and the intimate portraits that confront the rawness of survival and the scars that remain. Together they tell a story of life seen from both above and from within. A journey of embracing fragility while finding strength and renewal.”

So Rand, I really appreciate the personal story in here and the work is fabulous. I really love this. I love the emotional content, but I really love how you’re treating abstracts with aerial images and the way you use a variety of color. The pacing in here is extremely good. There’s a lot to like about this.

One thing I want to point out and I think this is what you’re talking about with the duality. A lot of times you have aerial images that are purely abstract. They’re just kind of color, they have shape in there and they have a wonderful feel to them. And then other times you splice it in with this stuff which is probably my favorite (‘cocaine lines’ image on page 86-7). And so you know what you see is an abstract and you think you have a context of scale and then you realize something in the image blows that up and you don’t have a context of scale. It is much bigger than it appears. And in this case, it’s the truck and the trailer’s up here.

This is outstanding. I really like this. It’s interesting because this reminds me of early on on this channel. This is over 10 years ago, I did a video on abstract photography. And as I was researching that, a lot of the early photographers that were considered to be abstract were people who were doing, stuff like radiology or macro photography. But one of those was actually the first photographers that were able to fly in planes and shoot aerial images. And you have to remember in context that was in a time where most people had not been in an airplane and it was a view of the world that they had never seen. And so abstraction came to play but it was kind of out of the result of being able to shoot from that new perspective.

Anyway, this is really wonderful and I think you have taken that in a whole new direction with obviously the modern technology that we have. The book is very well printed. The color is outstanding in here and that’s one of my favorite elements of this.

Make sure you check out Rand’s work.

Rand, awesome job, my man.