I’m Ben Tilden and this is my per­son­al web­site (remem­ber those?) Pro­fes­sion­al­ly, 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 explo­ration has tak­en me all over North Amer­i­ca and parts of Europe, the Mid­dle East, Hawaii, New Zealand, Japan and Chi­na.

Web and Design

I’ve worked on web­sites since the 1990s and start­ed work­ing in print design in the 2000s. I have designed every­thing from slide decks to mag­a­zines to bill­boards. In gen­er­al, I try to apply the phi­los­o­phy of Strunk and White’s ​‘The Ele­ments of Style’ to visu­al design, attempt­ing to com­mu­ni­cate as much impor­tant infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble in the clean­est and most effi­cient way. 

Pho­tog­ra­phy

I’ve loved tak­ing pho­tos since my first cam­era as a kid. 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 in the 1990s, a 35mm Yashika T4 (thanks to the strong endorse­ment of Philip Green­spun’s web­site in the mid-1990s).

On this web­site are some of my land­scape, trav­el, and street pho­tos, but I also do head­shots and event pho­tog­ra­phy for work. You can see more on Flickr and Insta­gram.

Trav­el

Noth­ing gives me the same thrill as explor­ing a new place, whether in my own back­yard or some place on the oth­er side of the world.

Cook­ing

My mom gave me cook­ing lessons around 7 or 8 years old, and I’ve always loved the cre­ative aspects of it — both in the sense of try­ing new things and in the sense of lit­er­al­ly just mak­ing some­thing. But it was­n’t until my mid-thir­ties, when it struck me that being able to put real food on your table was an impor­tant and very adult skill to have, that I start­ed real­ly try­ing to get good at it. When the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic put us in lock­down for weeks and month, I start­ed cook­ing vir­tu­al­ly all my own meals, day in and day out, which cat­a­pult­ed me pret­ty dra­mat­i­cal­ly for­ward in my knowl­edge and skill. Like many peo­ple, this gave me a way to expe­ri­ence those months as a time of growth rather than stag­na­tion. The 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.