About Kodokama

Hey, everybody! How are you? Hope you’re having a lovely day.

My name is Tanner, but my cool online pretend name is Kodokama. I’m a 32 year old (why would I commit to saying this knowing I have to come back every year and update this) individual that makes…well, what would I call this? 3D-SciFi-Infrared-Photography-With-A-Dash-Of-ADHD? That’s honestly pretty accurate. I think a simpler way to put it is that I create based on things I find stimulating either online or in person. 

I’m not someone that typically has these grand schematics in my head from nothing that I can just throw down onto a canvas. My mental space only has room for an 8 second loop of a song I heard 20 years ago apparently. If you don’t feel like a creative person, then we’re probably pretty similar. When I’m given a blank piece of a paper and a pencil, I’ll probably draw cubes, or that “S” thing we all somehow drew in elementary school, and that’s about it. I need to have external stimuli to get the juices flowing. My mediums just happen to be great for that, and include photography or Blender (which to me is just Legos and photography that’s unbound by reality). 

My childhood is a bit fuzzy, but I think I was conjured into existence, and my Gamer Mom handed me a SNES controller and said “Megaman X and Super Mario RPG await you, my dear boy!".

Needless to say, I’m a metal-headed nerd that mostly exists in a perpetual state of digital nostalgia. I’ve got 2 older brothers that are equally guilty in hammering these qualities in me with exposure to things like: Princess Mononoke, Trigun, DBZ, Akira, Techno/Trance music, Counter-Strike 1.6, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Beetle Borgs, and pretty much a slew of other late 90's eye and ear candy. 

Where’s Dad in all of this? Don’t worry, we wrangled him into Battlefield 1942, Dune 2000, and Total Annihilation. Nobody was free from the gamer shackles in this household.

My creative journey feels pretty unconventional. Phone cameras were something I just became addicted to as they made their way into our society. By the time you could take pictures with your phone, I was outside taking pictures of everything. My MySpace selfies were probably my magnum opus. Tom actually sold MySpace and traveled the world doing photography. He was my top friend on there, so I’m probably his biggest inspiration and why he did that. So proud of you, Tom. Anyway, if some terrible human being managed to peel me off of my gaming chair and take me away from World of Warcraft, I was probably taking pictures with my phone. I was even having dreams about doing it. It eventually followed me as a passion until I pursued some college classes for it. Those classes ended up being where I learned the most about myself in life, and what it means to see a little differently.

I did photography and service industry related work throughout all of my 20s until I experienced a pretty heavy burnout from never really working with my passion directly. I was doing work that involved a camera, sure, but I realized I was photographing things that other people wanted. I had mistakenly believed that I could just click photos at whatever I wanted and people would pound on my door with bags of money for this nice shot I took of a traffic cone. One could dream. 

Either way, in 2020 this really bad sickness thing came around the world that forced me to stay indoors (Oh NO!) and I realized I needed a better outlet to combat my depression. That’s where Blender came into my life! I did daily renders for around 260 days and then other things took over. 

My current reality takes place in Colorado, where my days are a mix of work, 3D, photography, streaming on Twitch, playing games, listening to music, and spending time in nature doing a mix of phone and infrared photography with a converted Panasonic GH4.

I feel like I have more questions than answers every day in life, but my aim is to at least learn something every day. My dream life would be to stream my creative process on Twitch and provide Blender assets to those that are trying to learn, or to make people that don’t feel creative realize that they still possess the ability to create entire beautiful worlds if they so choose.

You read all of this? I’m shocked. Am I always this chatty? Why hasn’t my therapist told me? Oh well. Regardless, thank you for being here. I genuinely do hope you’re having a good day and that life is kind to you in this wild reality we face.

Where am I right this moment? Statistically… probably live on Twitch, polishing glass at work, or asleep, or creating something new that I can share with you. Come say "hi" sometime through email (not while I’m sleeping), and tell me the things that creatively fuel you! 

TLDR: Old man take picture and do the 3D, and I like Megaman.