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Kelly Javanmardi
@k.marksthespot
Photographer based in the US
Having come back to Montana as a Covid-19 refugee, I found myself on an overnight adventure in Glacier National Park last summer with my dad, an outdoor enthusiast and photographer himself. We arrived during golden hour, hiked up to a lake overlook in time to shoot sunset, then stayed for blue hour and, finally, for the milky way to rise.
"The viewpoint we chose was quite busy at sunset, but by the time blue hour finished, it was just the two of us in the pitch black night in grizzly bear country."
We stayed for hours in this spot shooting the milky way as it moved across the sky (while I nervously sang to keep the bears away). We later packed everything back up and headed down the trail to our car, across multiple snow fields, stopping to shoot the Neowise comet half way down. Once we got to our car, we made our way down to another lake in the park to shoot sunrise. We ended up catching the tail end of the milky way over that lake and then an hour or so later made some coffee and watched the sun rise over the majestic mountains.
It was during this exhilarating, exhausting and fantastic father-daughter adventure that I shot one of the photos I am most proud of. I captured the foreground shot at blue hour, and the sky shot once the milky way had risen. I approached the edit in the hopes of creating the sense of awe that I experienced that warm summer night watching the stars light up the landscape around us at this magical mountain lake.
My love of the outdoors and of photography definitely stems from my dad. Almost all of my childhood memories are of camping trips, trips to Yellowstone National Park or hiking in the mountains in Northern Idaho where I was born and then in Northwest Montana when we moved there in 2000. I am from the Mission Valley and the mountains tower so epically over the valley that it takes my breath away every day. This valley is also part of the Flathead Indian Reservation, which is made up of three tribes – Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille, and home to the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi river – Flathead Lake.
"With such beautiful natural wonders all around me in this part of Montana, it is no wonder that most of my photography centers on local spots in this valley."
Being able to share my photography passion with my dad and have someone to explore and find new photography spots with was amazing. I started taking photography more seriously and started putting a lot of effort into growing my community on social media and really starting to make a side business out of this passion.
Going back to the start of my photography, I think living in Seattle was the real spark that lit my landscape photography passion. This is also where my love of hiking re-emerged and being able to get out into the stunningly beautiful mountains in the Pacific Northwest made me want to start capturing the beauty that I was experiencing with a camera. While my photography skills were very much at the beginner level while living there, it was my experiences there that pushed me to start focusing on landscape photography.
Later, when living in the San Francisco area, I connected a lot with other photographers. That part of California is so incredibly beautiful and I was able to get out and explore constantly – whether it was the rugged coastline, the epic mountains, the towering redwood forests, or even the magical deserts in Southern California.
"The incredible access to such diverse landscapes (and the incredible golden light that California gets) really motivated me to pick up my camera and start shooting again and again."
"I moved around quite a bit throughout my life, and I am pretty sure my love of travel comes from growing up with family scattered all over the world."
In a nutshell, my mom is British and her sister married a South African, so her family was split between England and South Africa, which meant we would travel internationally often to visit family. When I was 9 my parents also decided to move us to South America, where we lived for just shy of a year in a rural mountainous part of central Ecuador. I was in British Columbia to attend boarding school for my final two years of high school and then chose to volunteer abroad in the Dominican Republic for a year following graduation. I went back to British Columbia for university, returned to Dominican Republic for my third year of school and ended up transferring back to Montana to finish off my undergraduate degree. Immediately following my graduation, I got married and moved to Malaysia, where I did my Master’s degree. It was after this period that we moved to Seattle for four years and then to San Francisco for work.
"Having settled in a wide variety of new places quite frequently, changing bases feels kind of natural to me."
I have always enjoyed that sort of change and I love being able to base myself in new places and experience those areas fully and, fortunately, my husband had a similar upbringing and it comes naturally to him as well. I suppose I have a nomadic soul and the thought of staying in one place forever makes me very uncomfortable. It wasn’t until having our daughter and wanting a more stable childhood for her once she starts school that the thought of settling down to one place for a long period of time started appealing to us.
We have based ourselves in one place for extended periods of time and been able to build a home, but also make the most of every opportunity we have to travel – whether that is weekend road trips or multiple international trips in a year. I have always tried to join companies that offer generous paid vacation, as having travel in my life is something that is very important to me. And after some time spent away traveling, it is always really nice to come back home!
It is the greatest school in life and helps to expand your mindset, be flexible and adaptable. Say yes to more opportunities – whether that is to go on more hikes, to travel to new places, to meet new people…just say yes more often! Diving with whale sharks in Thailand, swimming with jellyfish in Palau, seeing firefall in Yosemite National Park, climbing a Mayan pyramid in Mexico, staring at the milky way for the first time, visiting Machu Picchu in Peru, watching sunrise in Monument Valley from my tent, taking a helicopter tour over San Francisco, having Mesa Arch all to myself at sunrise, seeing the Maldives islands from the sky, flying in a hot air balloon in Cappadocia, eating incredible food in Japan… YES! These obviously sound amazing, and I said yes to all of those, of course, but don’t forget that to have these experiences, hard decisions sometimes have to be made. It’s letting go, overcoming fear, embracing uncertainty.
Being an introvert, I’d also tell my younger self more to put effort into finding friends that share my interests. I definitely had some confidence problems when I was younger, which meant that I did not go out of my way to meet new people and I often just went along with the things my friends liked to do rather than pursue the things that interested me. I would definitely encourage my younger self to work on that behaviour and mindset and just be myself and find people that enjoyed doing the things I enjoyed.
The moment you surround yourself with people that have the same interest, you get immersed in what you really love doing. Waves of inspiration and energy keep coming, motivating you and enabling you to excel. In the end, this is just a way of assuring your well-being. Being out in nature is my biggest form of stress-relief (and maybe even a form of therapy), and seeing a beautiful natural scene is something that brings me peace and joy. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until adulthood that I truly began to appreciate the beauty of nature. Once I started getting out into nature not just to say I did it, but to really experience and enjoy it, I started feeling the positive benefits that it has on my life. Reduced stress, peacefulness, a happy heart, a feeling of wonder and admiration…this can truly be experienced the moment you are in nature with all of your consciousness, with your heart and soul, and in my case, with my camera.
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