Feb. '10 update

A few weeks ago I finished uploading most all of my 2009 pictures to my stock gallery- a big chunk of that website done- just some captioning to do. Now I feel a bit freer to update more specialized galleries such as the carnival people of (primarily) West Coast Amusements, which is a company I worked on for quite a few years in the 90's. Basically it was there that I started to really get into portrait photography alongside the pencil portraiture that I was already then known for. Looking through those photographs is interesting in that it's not always obvious if I was improving...there are places in the sequence of images that shows plain old shutter bug shooting and then all of a sudden a rash of really nice portraits. It kind of speaks of the nature of the travelling lifestyle- rushing around a great deal of the time and only when we slow down and really look and consider our surroundings/subjects can we really see what it is that we're trying to capture.

Carnival People section is at the bottom.



I remember NOT remembering if I had shot so-and-so's portrait or not...there is a lot of repetition of some people and I know the flip side of that is there are people whose faces I missed. That was my goal at the time- capturing a ‘perfect' on-the-spot portrait with my camera...because that's how I aspired to draw portraits. (This obviously results in minimal success rates!) My attitude obviously changed along the way - it just doesn't happen that way often enough. I went through a lot of film (and pencil erasers) with a decent (but not exceptional) success rate of 1-2 out of a 36-exposure role of film if I'm being honest. Digital has improved photographic chances of success –even with a random approach, which I’m trying to avoid- but not the drawing! Anyway, I'm posting the good with the not-so-good and will eventually highlight my favourites.

I'm also engaged in another project of digitally enhancing old photos that my father took for the purposes of stock imagery. This is a kind of specialized type of image- what they sometimes call vintage photography and is usually incorporated in art or illustration projects. More on that another time...

Art show coming up next month and I just selected what I’m putting in- pencil portraits from last year. I’ve kind of kept my drawing to myself in my focus on digital art and photography but seeing as I did so many portraits that I’m pleased with I will show them. Most likely the ones below and larger ones can be found here.