Hi! I’m Ben Tilden and I’m a design­er, pho­tog­ra­ph­er and web devel­op­er. I also love to cook. I’ve lived in Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton, for most of my life, but my love of pho­tog­ra­phy has tak­en me all over North Amer­i­ca and parts of Europe, the Mid­dle East, Hawaii, New Zealand, Japan and Chi­na.

Prob­a­bly my favorite thing is explor­ing and seek­ing out new places, whether it’s a cor­ner of my own city or some place thou­sands of miles from home.

Web and Design

I’ve worked on web­sites pro­fes­sion­al­ly since 1997, and start­ed work­ing in print design in 2005. I have worked on a wide range of projects, from slide decks to mag­a­zines to bill­boards. In gen­er­al, I try to apply the phi­los­o­phy of Strunk and White’s ​‘The Ele­ments of Style’ in my visu­al design, striv­ing to com­mu­ni­cate as much impor­tant infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble in the clean­est and most effi­cient way. 

Pho­tog­ra­phy

I’ve been tak­ing pho­tos since child­hood, and for me, pho­tog­ra­phy nev­er gets old. My cur­rent cam­era is a Fuji X‑T5, but I have also used the X‑T2 and sev­er­al iPhones in the past, and before that a six megapix­el Pen­tax DSLR, and waaay back at the start, it was a 35mm Yashika T4 (thanks to the strong endorse­ment of Philip Green­spun’s web­site in the mid 1990s).

Most of the pho­tos you will see on my web­site are land­scape, trav­el, and street pho­tos, but I also occa­sion­al­ly pho­to­graph peo­ple at events, tak­ing a doc­u­men­tary approach.

You can see many more of my pho­tos on flickr and Insta­gram.

Trav­el

I don’t think any­thing else makes me quite as hap­py as the feel­ing of explor­ing a new place, whether it’s an overnight road trip or a month-long stay some­where on the oth­er side of the world.

Cook­ing

Like many peo­ple, my mom gave me cook­ing lessons as ear­ly as 7 or 8 years old. We start­ed with scram­bled eggs and worked our way up to the French dessert float­ing islands. In those days, I loved cus­tomiz­ing pan­cakes by adding a pinch of all­spice and cin­na­mon and cre­at­ing spe­cial blend Kool-aide fruit punch con­coc­tions by adding 7‑Up, a few drops of lemon juice, or what­ev­er I could find around. I felt like a mad sci­en­tist, and food was fun.

I found a renewed inter­est in cook­ing in my mid-thir­ties. It struck me that being able to put real food on your table was an impor­tant and very adult skill to have. But it was­n’t until the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic that, for the first time, I start­ed cook­ing vir­tu­al­ly all my own meals, day in and day out. Mak­ing my own food this way cat­a­pult­ed me pret­ty dra­mat­i­cal­ly for­ward in my knowl­edge of food and skill in prepar­ing it. And this process of learn­ing, exper­i­ment­ing and prac­tic­ing gave me a way to expe­ri­ence those months of lock­down as a time of growth rather than stagnation. 

The incred­i­ble thing about food is that you’re nev­er done learn­ing — there’s always a new cui­sine, ingre­di­ent, tech­nique to learn. And the reward for your effort is tan­gi­ble and imme­di­ate: food.