trailwork

trailwork is a camera that produces images in two visual languages. The first is the language of trail cameras — infrared monochrome or specialized color, a soft halo around highlights, a data stamp burned into the bottom edge with date, time, place, weather, and moon phase. The second is the language of regional color: every photograph in this mode is cast in the dominant color of the EPA Level III ecoregion where you stood, so a picture taken in the Willamette Valley is gold, one taken in the Mojave is bleached silica, one taken in the Tongass is rainforest blue-green. Every photograph in either mode is signed with the coordinates where you stood at the moment you made it. This GPS precision to four decimal points, or about 30 feet, is part of the work, not an oversight.

trailwork is interested in attention to specific places and the way in which people, animals, and plant life inhabit them. The app is intentionally limited. Three optical lenses (0.5×, 1×, 3×) and one digital crop (2×). The user may zoom up to 15× digitally. Two overlays: trail-cam or ecoregion. Within trail-cam: IR or color. Within ecoregion: a print mode that saves a 48-megapixel lossless TIFF alongside the JPEG, for prints and gallery output. Flash on, off, or auto. Tap to focus, drag to bias exposure. The shutter. An interactive atlas of every ecoregion and its corresponding color, accessible from the about screen. Captures save to your Photo Library. There are no filters, no settings menus, no editing, no in-app gallery, no sharing. To browse your photographs, use Photos.

trailwork is a functional art piece by Adam DeSorbo, an artist working in photography, woodworking, and material processes related to time, place, and ecological attention. It extends an earlier web-based work, On Trail, into a portable form. It is free, ad-free, and collects no data beyond what is required to make and stamp the photographs. See the full privacy policy at adamdesorbo.com/trailwork-privacy. See more of Adam DeSorbo's work at adamdesorbo.com.