Photography

As has been stated here since the outset, my paintings are all derived from my own photographs. Although I graduated college as a Studio Art Painting Major, I spent over forty years in the world of professional photography before really focusing on painting. I have recently decided that since less than one percent of my source photographs are selected to become paintings, I would like to share some of my photography with the public.

I have begun the long process of uploading images to Fine Art America. All of these images share the following: They were never considered to be used as paintings. They stand alone as photographs in that some images are more suited to stand as photographic images than paintings. All of the images were cropped in camera, meaning they are reproduced here as seen through the viewfinder. None of the photographs have been retouched, altered or filtered. I grew up on The Zone System, where previsualization of the final image was the key to capturing the image.

Back in "the old days", one could control the image by previsualizing what would be black, what would be white and what would be in between, either in black and white or in color. (Although The Zone System was designed and used for black and white photography, the basic principles of previsuallization apply to color photography as well.) Once the film was exposed in anticipation of the expected image, the film developing and printing process would complete the image and bring it, hopefully, to the previsualized conclusion. Such are all of the images that you will see on this site. While computers and software have brought many tools to a photographer's fingertips, the most important tools are the eyes and the brains of photographers to plan and execute successful imagery. The newer tools can be nice, but they can also be a gimimick; a means to let a machine or an algorithm do one's thinking, which in my humble opinion, is a mistake and a degradation of the process.