Intent
Photography, to me, is a meditative process. To capture one of my images, I must give myself over to the moment and be fully present. Only then do I have the ability to see the world in full clarity and detail so that I can capture it as it truly is. Since I have a deep love of nature and being out of doors is where I can most easily be fully present, I take my camera with me.
What I hope you find in my photographs are slivers of reality, frozen in time and rich with detail. I liken them to a childhood memory of a bright summer day, when everything was new and glorious and vivid. I hope you feel that too when you see them.
Post-Processing
I learned about developing and printing in the era of black and white film, dark rooms and enlargers. Though I have moved over to color and digital, those basic skills still serve me well, even in software. The camera is not the human eye and the limitations it has in terms of dynamic range and contrast means that there needs to be some processing to make an image look as it did to me at the moment of capture. My post-processing typically consists of cropping (if needed for composition), contrast adjustments and a touch of sharpening, but rarely more. If I captured the image correctly, that is all that should be needed. My main focus throughout post-processing is to make sure that the final product matches my memory of the moment to the highest degree possible.
Printing
I sell prints because I believe that until it is printed, an image is not fully realized. Even though you can view a digital image on a screen, I feel that a physical print is a more genuine representation of the captured moment in time. Why? We see the world through our eyes which collect reflected light to create the images we see. This same process happens when we look at a print, but not when we view an image on a screen. This is because screens are transmitted light devices (the light is behind the translucent image which it illuminates) which tend to make things too bright. They also don’t have the color palette or resolution of a fine art print (no, not even on a 5k Retina). Finally, images viewed on a screen are ephemeral, as opposed to a tangible print, and since my intent is to capture a moment in time, they just don’t make the grade.
At this point, you may ask why the website full of images, if computer screens aren’t the best for representing them? The simple answer is that a website is the most effective method of reaching as many people as possible and even though the images aren’t at their best on the screen, they are pretty good. If you like how they look here, know that the prints will look even better.