Emerald Bay Photography News and Updates

Great article in the New York Times today. Renowned photojournalist David Burnett explains why he prefers lugging around a 55-year-old 4-by-5-inch Graflex Speed Graphic camera to his Canon 20D digital SLR.

On the screen was a wide overhead picture of a John Kerry rally last fall in Madison, Wis., which Mr. Burnett shot with a Canon 20D digital camera, the same camera used by thousands of other professionals around the world. Not surprisingly, the picture looks like thousands of others that were shipped around the globe during the campaign.

The colors are bright. Every part of the image is crisp, so crisp that just picking the minuscule figure of Mr. Kerry out of the huge crowd takes a "Where's Waldo?" moment.

And then Mr. Burnett flipped to a photograph taken seconds later with the ancient Speed Graphic. Suddenly, the image took on a luminescent depth. The center of the image, with Mr. Kerry, was clear. Yet soon the crowd along the edges began to float into softer focus on translucent planes of color.

The effect is to direct the viewer's eye to Mr. Kerry while also conveying the scale and intensity of the crowd. In accomplishing both at the same time, the old-fashioned photograph communicates a rich sense of meaning that the digital file does not.

The digital picture pretends to display raw reality. The analog picture is a visualization of human memory.

Alert photographers might also remember the image David Burnett took of Al Gore on the campaign-trail that won him a "Eyes of History" award. It was taken with a $15 plastic Holga camera.

Labels: photography, photography gear

Photographers who have been in the business for many more moons than me will placidly smile at me for this post, for they know the feeling (and they're sooo over it) - making that very first cover.

But - it's still exciting for me. Especially if the cover is for a classy publication like Bend Living - or more precisely, the "High Desert Home" section of the June 2005 edition of Bend Living.



Shooting the house of painter Rika Peterson has been a real pleasure in more than one way - after the exhaustive selection of log and arts-and-crafts homes I've shot over the past years, Rika's clean white walls (adorned with those fabulous paintings), the straight lines, and modern furniture was like a much-needed rejuvination for my own artistic eye.

Above all though it was a challenge. Shooting a home that gets away with very little detail decoration - all the while wrestling two young, energetic Great Danes roughly the size of your average circus pony into sitting still on a sofa - was a lot harder than it sounded at first. Getting those colors (and especially the white of the walls) just right, was a whole other can of worms.

But even without the reward of the cover, the experience itself was well worth it.
For I got to work with a fantastic photo editor who chose all my favorite images (thanks, Tiffany!), I gained a new friend in Rika - *and* the hearts of Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, the two very large, very slobbery dogs Rika calls her own.

Labels: architectural photographer Bend Oregon, photography