A small group of mountain goats stand at attention, startled to find themselves in the scope of Timothy Thimmes’ lens. The center goat, a brave nanny, faces off with the lens, her kid demurely curious beside her. Two other members of the herd look on, just outside the camera’s focus. The four are composed in a satisfying arrangement– the nanny tall in the center of the group, with her companions flanking her on either side, nearly symmetrical in their relative size. Tall pines rise up around them, the sharp gray tips of the trees in a sort of conversation with the sharp gray tips of the goats’ horns. Beyond the herd, the sun sets on the side of a mountain, a purple shadow creating a lovely backdrop for the animals’ bright wool.
Timothy Thimmes is a purist when it comes to light. A stickler for craft, Thimmes works to get the composition, shape, detail, and light right from the beginning of the process, rather than rely-ing simply on electronic post-processing and image enhancement. “It must be perfect from the start,” he says. Thimmes trained at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, earning a BFA in photography, after pivoting from an early educational direction that involved receiving aBS in business management from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He merged the two paths and went on to open his own studio in Los Angeles, with clients including Columbia Tri-Star, MGM, Orion Pictures, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, and others. He and his wife, Janet, moved to Summit County, where they opened a marketing and advertising agency, T SquaredStudios. Thimmes loves his life in Utah, where, in addition to taking photographs, he skis and raises llamas.
