About
About The Photographer
A dedicated “Urbanite” my goal is to document the beauty, diversity and differences that define the Urban environment of each city I visit. My medium is the camera and a photographic eye for the moment. If there is substantial “Photoshop” or “digital darkroom” work done to a photograph, the photographic is shown only on the “Digital Art” link of my website. Otherwise, there may be some exposure adjustments, cropping, minimal sharpening, dodging or burning, or straightening done to an original shot. My first goal is to produce a quality photograph from each time I push the camera button. I am just “old-fashioned” enough to want the picture I take to be perfect from the moment I see it.
Today, I am armed with a point-and-shoot Canon SD1000IS camera as well as a Canon Digital Rebel T1i with an 18-200mm zoom, several additional lens and filters, Canon 430E flash and 3 tripods of varying weights and design. I will add I am exceptionally delighted with my new Digital Rebel T1i! Having had it for only a short time, and that time being extraordinarily busy, the T1i and I have not been out shooting as much as I would have liked. However, the pictures I have taken so far exceed my expectations. I own the original Canon Digital Rebel as well, though it has found a new life with Mike at steam-ups.
I purchased my first “real” camera on a trip in the 1970s to Guam. With a 35mm Mamiya, I found a new way to express myself. For a few years, as I could afford the film and developing, I shot everything in sight. I read the owners manual, but never anything on the art of photography. The best of my work, I had enlarged and framed and hung on my walls. People would comment when visiting me on the “art” on my walls, but I never gave it another thought. I was satisfied with the act of self-expression and the pleasure of looking at them on my walls.
Fast forward 20 years, and the digital revolution had blossomed and matured. For me, technology opened vistas I only dreamed about before. First the world of computers, cell phones, then cameras and video equipment. I am in heaven on earth. Though as early as 1999 I dabbled in digital photography, 2002 brought my first “real” digital camera. From that point forward I try not go anywhere without a camera in my pocket, purse or hand. My abiding principle is to not leave home without one. If one does not have a camera in hand, one cannot take a picture. And if I leave home without it, a picture will surely present itself, the inner eye will “see” what I should be capturing, and I will feel bereft at not being able to record the moment.
About The CITY
Now I live and thrive in the city, camera to my eye, capturing the decisive moments.
Even as I read the magazines and the books on many and varied locales (I might add, none of which are urban), what calls my soul are not the mountains, grasslands and rivers, but rather the jungle of concrete, glass, asphalt and steel of the city, the people, their pets, the plants and the trees.
I was raised in the soil, daughter of a farmer. But I was also the daughter of a city girl. When my father brought home to meet the family his soon-to-be-wife, my city girl mother, with her full skirted crinolined dresses and curly, auburn red hair, his sister was appalled. He’d brought home a “City Girl”! We lived in the country, on a farm. And my city-girl mother was an adequate, if not outstanding, farm wife with a city career. She learned all the things a farm wife had to do and she did them with city-fied style.
I was raised on the soil, but grew up loving the concrete. For many years I lived in a city. First I moved to Honolulu, a city with a style unlike any other city! Then I moved back to the soil for a while, to the Big Island of Hawaii. I had moved to sugar cane jungles, lava flows, mountains and streams. Then, due to other circumstances, I moved to the suburbs (aka, The Burbs) of Edmond, Oklahoma. There I lived in a central heat/air house with blinding, white hot, concrete sidewalks, backyard barbeques and swimming pools, and children playing in the quiet tree-lined streets.
Then finally I got to come home again to the city. There I learned that my heart beats fastest, the heat rises and my soul stirs when I look out my windows at the city.
Welcome to The Urban Landscape….dedicated to the CITIES of the world.