about blair

PHOTOGRAPHER. WRITER. RUNNY EGG YOLK HEART.


Blair Speed is a Montana-based photographer, writer, and speaker. She crafts intimate images that communicate beauty, empathy, and spirit. Whether shooting personal, fine art, or commercial, her ability to hold moments is seen through her lens and an ever present appreciation for connection. Blair’s lens shows her heart.

She unexpectedly lost her love and husband in 2019. This loss has shifted, stripped, and expanded her ability to see and to feel, always impacting how she captures life through moments witnessed or through written and spoken word.

Blair hopes her photography and her words honor the real, raw, and imperfectly perfect moments she is able to bear witness to.

she sees in many mediums

Writer. Speaker. A woman of words.


Blair has begun publishing articles on love, loss, movement and heart in her Substack titled Full Speed. Come join the conversation.

More archived writing is found on her personal Instagram @blairspeed.

Blair has been an athlete for her entire life. Her physical fitness and ability to move across technical terrain allows her to access unique locations and situations. She is strong, with the endurance to carry gear and herself over many miles and to document arduous, backcountry adventures. She is comfortable in mountain environments, having climbed Granite Peak (MT) in a day several times, The Grand Teton, and was fortunate to experience The Teton Picnic. She ran the Rim 2 Rim 2 Rim across the Grand Canyon with friends (while taking pictures) and raced The High Lonesome 100 Mile Race which is held at high altitude in 2023.

Blair is trained in high-angle rope access and owns the equipment necessary to rig safety and ascent systems so she may hang from walls, rocks, or ice while documenting. She grew up riding horses and can walk, canter, and gallop English, Western, or bareback and has been on assignment many times atop a horse. Blair has shot on mountain peaks, on frozen waterfalls, in alpine waters, from inside helicopters and also while being short-hauled below one. Her wilderness experience, which includes managing herself and equipment in temperatures down to -25 degrees, allows her to reach very special places where she captures powerful and enduring images of the human experience.

an athlete on the job


golden heart


Travis Swanson has been a North Star, compass, and exemplary heart to those fortunate to have known him. He died in a climbing accident in 2019 at the age of 33. Blair’s immediate writings after losing her husband are archived here. This is a part of the love, life, and lessons shared between Travis Swanson and Blair Speed.