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About These Images...
Although I began photographing and printing using digital techniques years earlier, I feel that digital imaging technology did not become mature enough to consider for serious work until about 2006. Even then, the digital printing process was rather crude compared to darkroom printing, but the software (i.e., Adobe Photoshop) was certainly providing retouching techniques that were beyond what one could do in the darkroom. At the same time, the permanence of digital imaging caught up with prints made from film and printed in a darkroom.
These images have been both taken and printed with digital tools; a digital SLR camera, and printed on an Epson archival inkjet printer using archival paper.
When I first started using a digital camera, I felt that the images were not quite up to my standards or a film-camera comparison. Since the "straight" images were of low resolution I started to manipulate the images to get a more textured/painterly effect. I have always loved impressionistic paintings, and when I found I could make my digital images have a similar “look” I started experimenting. The detail that was not part of the images in the first place was not important for this type of "impressionist" image. I have refined my techniques in Photoshop so that I can achieve a new/different feel to the image, one that is neither painterly nor photographic. I call this work “Photo-Impressionistic”. This type of image can have the advantages of both impressionism and photography, and has qualities of both at the same time. I guess I will be criticized by lovers of both types of images. They will say that I have degraded either type in order to look more like the other. But that has always been the issue with any new type of art, hasn’t it? Whenever a new art-tool (e.g., camera, computer) comes along, the artists using older tools don't recognize work done with the new tools as "art".
I hope that the viewer gets as much pleasure from looking at these images as I got in making them.