With an apartment in his native San Luis Obispo, but an urge to hit the road, 29-year-old photographer Mr Christian Ramirez has a love for home comforts and boundless nomadic tendencies – two competing states that create the perfect balance. “I treat San Luis Obispo as a base in between work trips or just hobby trips,” he says. “I come back, unload, chill for a couple days, load up again and go do something else.” His long road trips around the US, particularly down the West Coast and through the Midwest, are inspired by a few main things: surfing, fishing and, almost incidentally, his photography.

“Surfing and fishing are neck and neck as far as entertainment for me,” he says. “For surfing, sometimes I go to Oregon and Washington for cold water trips. I’ve been down to Baja. And I love fishing, so that draws me away from the coast to go east and inland to Utah, Idaho or Wyoming to fly-fish the rivers. Then photography obviously takes me places. For a job, rather than flying, I’ll load the car up and pack for a week or so to go for a little camping trip afterwards.”

It’s a passion that started out when he travelled around the US with his surf-mad dad. “We’ve always gone on surf trips, and back when I was younger, I was competing a lot, so my dad bought this old beat-up camper van that we used to travel for competitions from age 13 to 16,” he says. “We would just go camp around and do these contests. These longer road trips started once I got my driver’s licence and my first vehicle, a legendary 1996 Nissan Quest minivan in shiny baby blue.”

Ramirez pulled out the back seats, put in a mattress and made sure there was plenty of room for his surfboards. “That’s where the road trip side of it started. And ever since I’ve had a car, I’ve always had some sort of sleeping set-up.”

His current Toyota Tacoma was transformed into a stylish, Gorpcore mobile home using the after-market conversion specialists, Go Fast Camper. Ramirez says the secret to successful road trips is being super organised – if everything isn’t boxed up and pinned down in the truck, it’ll fly all over the place when he hits those bumpy dirt tracks. So he’s got his packing down to a T: first go in the cameras (“I’ve narrowed it down to a Makina 67, a Fujifilm GA645 and my digital Sony A7 IV, but I usually end up liking the film stuff the most”), then his clothes (“they’ve changed from stylish to techy”) and then his cooking set-up (a cooler, camp stove, cast iron pan, sandwich materials and enough meat for three days – “I definitely cook a lot of steak and eggs on the road”).

Since many of his friends have settled down and big group trips have dried up, Ramirez has embraced the benefits of the solo adventure. “As we get older, people become less available, but I continue to want to do these road trips,” he says. “So, it’s like, ‘Well, if I want to make that happen, I can’t wait around for people’s schedules to be available, I just have to go do it.’ It’s awesome sharing moments with friends and travelling with people, but the benefit of travelling by yourself is you don’t need to be on anyone else’s agenda.”

On the road, he goes wherever the wind blows and along the way, he shoots a mixture of epic landscapes and intimate portraits that capture American spirit and energy. “I love shooting people – the photos that I’m most proud of are typically portraits – but I do travel by myself a lot, so I’ll end up seeing amazing landscapes and I’ll grab a photo.”

Landscape photography is a tricky art form: enthusiastic amateurs are often shooting the same spots and it’s all too easy for mountain range to wind up looking like a screensaver. So how does he differentiate his work?

“A lot comes down to composition,” Ramirez says. “There are a million pictures of Half Dome in Yosemite from tunnel view by every tourist that’s walked through there. It’s iconic. It’s a cool picture, but… I would walk a trail either lower or higher and try to find a different angle that expresses that landscape in a unique way.”

Ramirez shoots for brands, stylish new adventure and outdoors magazines such as Daybreak and Field Mag and is taking part in his first group art show in San Luis Obispo. True to his nomadic urges, he’s charging down to Mexico less than two weeks before the opening to shoot Día de los Muertos.

While he loves showing his work, he’s happiest shooting when there’s no end goal. “I appreciate being able to just go out with no agenda – when there’s no shot list and nothing that you have to achieve. How are you going to shoot that? What type of art are you going to be able to make?”

Beyond the photos, Ramirez uses his time on the road to educate himself about the geography, history and culture of the areas he’s exploring. “I’m always trying to be conscious of the environment,” he says. “The terrain is typically pretty fragile, so it’s everyone’s responsibility to learn about the landscape. With fly-fishing, you must know weather patterns, you have to know where you’re at and the type of bugs and the type of grass on the side of the riverbanks. All that is vital for catching fish. I’m always looking things up and nerd-ing out on what the terrain is and what type of fish species are there.

“I was hiking in the east Sierras a few weeks ago, there’s tons of Native American artefacts all around. There are these big obsidian gardens that the Chumash would use to make arrowheads with and there was a trade route from the east Sierras to the west Sierras. I’m usually just Googling it on my phone, but I have a Native American friend who’s a geologist and archaeologist and works for the state in San Luis Obispo, so I call him and he’ll fill me in. He’s rad.”

Next up, Ramirez wants to travel to Western Australia, Indonesia and back to New Zealand, where he spent a year in his early twenties. He bought a van when he got out there and – you guessed it – put a bed in the back and travelled around.

“I loved it there,” he says. “I maxed out my Visa until they emailed me like, ‘Hey, you gotta leave.’ New Zealand is mind-blowing: snow-capped mountains and rivers everywhere. I can’t believe it’s all real.”

Which is perhaps the purpose of his work that captures life and landscapes on the road – as a reminder that it all is.