Getting my week started off right. That’s what happened this morning. First I was invited back as a guest speaker at Centerville’s Driscoll Elementary School Career Day, scheduled for March 19th.
I find kid’s honest enthusiasm for my work to be quite refreshing.
Second, I received a call from my friend Andy Sawyer, the Director of Archaeology at Sunwatch Indian Village, informing me that a photograph I took of the winter landscape and the reconstructed village had won 1st place in the Midwest Division of the National Historic Landmarks Photo Contest, an annual competition hosted and organized by the National Park Service.
I captured the winning image in January 2008 on a very cold and frosty morning. The photograph was taken using a Canon 1D Mark III digital SLR with a Canon 28-70mm f2.8 L lens, both mounted on a Bogen tripod with a Kirk ballhead. The final image was a merged digital file of three separate exposures of the same scene. A tonal adjustment tool was applied to render the final high dynamic range photograph.
The following are composites showing sample images from both sides of business for 2008 - commercial and freelance photography services, to include editorial, architectural interiors, corporate portraits, environmental portraits, products; and the fine art print sales of nature, landscapes and cityscapes. Plus there’s the stock image licensing. Just this month both Ohio Magazine and Layers Magazine (a national publication for graphic design professionals) published images from my stock portfolio.
I also noted (thanks to my Google notifiers) that one of my local competitors here in the Dayton area has started using HDR photography for some architectural interiors completed at The Greene. Gee, go figure.
If you want the real deal, along with professional service and images that truly capture the feel of your business, go with Jim Crotty of Picture Ohio, LLC. Call 1-877-JCrotty (527-6889), or 937-432-6711; email jim@calmphotos.com.
The stinging smell of stop bath solution. Mixing chemicals in brown plastic jugs and using all of my lawn cutting money for Kodak paper at Malone’s Camera Store. Loading exposed Tri-X film in the film processing tank by hand and in total darkness. Hanging 8″x10″ prints to dry. Red light bulbs. Worrying that my brother would come down stairs and turn on the lights while I was in the middle of making a print. Seeing the magic of the image appear on paper after careful timing with the enlarger.
Those are the memories that come to mind when I think back to my first explorations in the field of photography. This was WAY before the arrival of digital photography. I’m talking 1977.
Developing my own black and white prints in a home-made darkroom when I was only 12 formed the perfect foundation for a life-long love affair with photography. There was a fundamental discipline involved that demanded respect for the craft of image and print making. Granted it was not nearly as extensive or methodical as the incredible lengths that the masters of the early 20th century went through with their huge and cumbersome, 60 lb. 8″x10″ view cameras and obsession with perfect tonal range (think Adams, Weston and Strand), I still felt as if I were “paying my dues” - getting my fingers wet in the holy water of the print trays and being baptized into the company of those who have transcended the boundary of mere hobbyist and entered the realm of the serious amateur.
Even before converting the corner of my childhood home basement to my own darkroom, I had been introduced to the wonders of the black and white darkroom at the Dayton Museum of Natural History. It was there that my astronomy instructor helped me develop and make prints of some my very first astro-photographs; time exposures on high speed Tri-X film of Comet West - a brilliant display in the early morning sky and comet so bright it has yet to be reviled since. I still kick myself for losing track of this negatives and prints.
One of the more common digital editing techniques is that of “handcoloring” - the converting of full-color, digital image files to monochrome and then applying layers and the eraser or paintbrush tool to bring out the areas of color where the photographer artist would like to emphasize.
I don’t use this technique on a regular basis, but whenever I do there’s always a positive and enthusiastic response from those who follow my work.
The following images make use of this technique along with “tinting” of the entire image area, which gives the photograph a more dated or faded look.
I just received word that three of my recent HDR photographs are going to appear in the January/February issue of “Layers Magazine” - a widely distributed publication written for artists and photographers who work with Adobe software products, the most notable being Photoshop.
Black and white (with some sepia and a little color) photographs of Ft. Pulaski - the Civil War-era fortress that guarded the entrance to the Savannah River, captured and occupied by Union forces in 1862.
