About...
...the guy with the camera
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born and raised in California, before circumstances and the prevailing winds brought me to Ireland, where I now live with my three children.
Photography started for me with my grandmother's Kodak 126 Instamatic, and a summer school class when I was 10. We went on walkabouts to shoot pictures, developed the film and printed prints. It was the best part of the summer (besides the mythology class trip to the Getty Museum). It's also where I got hooked on the smell of fixer. I didn't get a chance to get back into the darkroom until two years later, but when I did, I experienced the same buzz I'd had that summer. The same buzz I still get today. |
...the photographs
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The photographs fall into a handful of categories: the sea, my children, a combination of the two, and everything else.
When she was six, my daughter once told me that life seemed like a movie that she was watching through her eyes. I like that perspective. And so, these photographs are frames from the movie I'm watching through my eyes; random presses on the pause button. Some time when you're watching a movie, try it... |
...the web site
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The web site is two things: a cross-section of my photographs and an information kiosk of sorts. It won't change much over time. No news. No updates. |
...the approach
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Digital is easy. I can shoot as much as I want, and do what I want with it. For whatever reason, I consider it wide open, and open game. Digital is what prompts me to experiment. Crops, coloring, layers and textures, all possibilities without hopefully being overdone. It's all a matter of taste, but still, there are limits. I try not to exceed them.
With film, it's different, for reasons that many people give. I slow down when I'm shooting film. I think. I meter. I think again. I wait. Almost all the film shots, I take only once. With the integral Polaroids, I don't even look - take the shot, put it in the bag while it's developing, and move on. I'll look at them later when I'm home, or wherever. It's a great game - will I get what I thought I got? Then the scanning. Polaroids I spend as much time as necessary to make the scan look as identical to the original as possible. With film, I think of Ansel Adams' analogy of film being the score and prints being the performance. Since I usually don't have prints, what comes out on screen is one "performance", the same as I might use different filters for contrast, different papers, different developers, toner. I try to take only the same liberties I might in a darkroom. |