About Me

Yeah that’s a picture of me right there on the left. I can’t help it if the best photo that I have was taken 10 years ago. :-)

I love photographing interiors. I started specializing in architecture in the mid-80s. I’ve always enjoyed the fact that the subject of my work was inherently beautiful. That’s not something that you can always say about wedding photography, or portraits or products. I used to imagine that the space that I was shooting was created by a professional set designer just for me to photograph.

Sometimes in my marketing verbiage, I get deep into all of the technical aspects of image editing. But I would never want anyone to forget that everything that I like to call my “art“ exists only because of the interior designer’s art... But, you know, I like to talk mostly about myself. :-)

I Was Born In A Log Cabin

No, but seriously, in the early days of my career, everything was shot on film. Virtually all architecture was photographed on 4 x 5 inch sheet film using a perspective control view camera. This is the camera with the bellows, and you get underneath the black cloth to see the the image on the ground glass. But the big view cameras have so far, sort of failed to make a gracefull transition to digital, at least for my purposes.

Shooting interiors back then involved bringing in a lot of lights. The way I did it also involved doing some very tricky multiple exposures on a single piece of film. I would sometimes cover the windows and photograph the interiors with one filter. Then turn off the interior lights, uncover the windows and add a second exposure to the same piece of film, but with a different color filter.

It was complex, it was technical, and it was expensive, but it made for some pretty cool images. The architects and designers would say “Wow I didn’t know you could do that.“

And Then...Digital

Everything changed when photography went digital. It took several of years for the quality of the cameras to get to a point where using digital instead of film wouldn't automatically mean an inferior image. Eventually I started using a full frame Nikon DSLR.

Now We Can Edit

I've been working with Adobe Photoshop since version 1.0. Now instead of using multiple exposures on a single sheet of film, I use multiple image files layered in Photoshop. I can have one layer that was shot with the lights on, and another that was shot with only the window light. Photoshop compositing gives me the technical control that allows me use my skills and experience to create a rendering that is realistic, and often enhanced.

As mentioned previously, the new technology also means that now the process of shooting is completely separate from the job of assembling the final image. In fact, the shooter no longer needs to bother with a lot of the technical issues that had to be dealt with using film. That not only makes it possible but often preferable to have two artists handling these separate processes.

You Shoot – I Edit.

Several years ago I retired from shooting, to concentrate on image editing. It has worked out well. It seems there is a need for this service within the Industry, and for me, it's a satisfying avenue for artistic expression.