DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

Big Mo

5/26/2019

Everyone’s life takes twists and turns. My biggest as a photographer happened when it became clear my Minolta XG-M which had accompanied me overseas and with which I’d shot hundreds of 35mm photographs had to be replaced. Minolta was in the process of being bought out by Sony at the time (and if you ever wonder where Sony got its photographic chops, it bought it from Minolta) and all the mounts were changing, which meant all my lenses would also have to be replaced. I was coming out of grad school, I had student loans to pay, I was trying to get married, I was trying to buy a house, I was trying to become a father, I was trying to start a career.

I could not begin to justify spending money on new photography equipment to satiate my damned hobby. So I walked away.

For a half dozen years, I did not capture a single image.

Two things happened:

Digital photography emerged;
My incredible wife, to who I owe my life, bought me my first digital camera.

I was already a computer nerd. Once I came to understand the power of using the computer to create art from digital photography, I finally began to slowly emerge from the womb. DamnPhotoArtist was born.

My philosophy: There will never be a camera lens that can match what I see in my head. The computer is my artboard. But, especially in nature photography, there are works captured every day by professional photographers using ungodly expensive photographic equipment that is phenomenally gorgeous art! Incredible work that humbles me to the bone.

What if, instead of diving into PhotoArt, I had dived the other direction – screw the debt, forget the family, and plowed thousands of dollars into photography equipment, and traveled the world capturing wonders.

Once in a while, a shot like this one comes out – straight photography, done with equipment on-hand, employing little or no computer enhancement, that reveals so much that no enhancement is necessary. And it makes me wonder – what if? What if?

***

Welcome to minimalism week! I’m going to make three posts this week of recent work in which the computer played no more role than a standard darkroom enlargement easel could accomplish. Big MO here was captured using my Nikon1 V3 with a 30-110 lens. I love the detail – look at the drops of dew clinging to the blades of grass. Look at the steely glint in Big Mo’s eye. “Besides, YOU didn’t kill Liberty Valance”!

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Curtis Hendricks

All my life I have had to learn to do things differently. To see the world differently.

Art attracted me from the beginning. Almost every home in the tiny farming village where I grew up had DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper’ on the wall. I would come across modern abstract art in magazines and be absolutely fascinated by the colors and techniques.

But there were no artists in my village. No one understood what modern art was. Or why it was. But there was an appreciation for photography.

I began shooting with a 1960 model Agfa rangefinder fixed-lens 35mm camera and learned to use darkroom techniques to finish my work. Graduating to a single lens reflex camera I worked primarily with Kodachrome. Digital photography opened a new world. The computer became the artboard I never had; the darkroom I could never afford. I discovered there would never be a camera or a lens that could capture what I saw in my head – that, I had to learn to create on my own.

I use the photograph the same way a painter uses a charcoal sketch – as a starting place. I squeeze out the unseen hiding between the pixels; the angels, the demons of my own imagination.

Light. Color. Darkness. Perspective. Introversion. Mystery. Love.

DamnPhotoArtist

Big Mo

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Curtis Hendricks

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