About The Images

One of my greatest flaws through the years has been the failure to thoroughly photograph each project following its completion. In fact, the first two or three years of work went completely undocumented. Eventually, realizing my mistake, I would at least try to take a snapshot in the shop, outside on the lawn, or possibly at the client's home upon delivery. Needless to say, very few of these photos are of sufficient quality to merit serious consideration.

Working in large format as is my preference, requires dedication, time, proper lighting, and a sizable budget; none of which were obtainable to me, having just starting out in business. The images I selected for the site, therefore, mainly had to meet one simple criterion - they had to be reasonably editable in Photoshop. Fortunately, small compressed graphics on web pages can be very forgiving of casual editing. Out of this collection, I then had to select the group which I felt best represented the variety I wished to illustrate. Of the hundreds of photos I began with, I estimate that less than five percent actually made the cut. The largest percentage of these were again 35mm snapshots. Several were from more carefully composed medium format film, while two or three were from more recent large format chromes. A number of the small format negatives were professionally scanned at a local photo finisher. All of the medium and large format films were scanned here using a Heidelberg Linoscan. The jpeg compression factors selected were a bit overzealous, but I wished to use slightly larger images than typically seen online and chose to trade off size for a bit of clarity.

One of my main considerations was uniformity of the graphics. Such a menagerie of images needed to be made more consistent in appearance. The result for some, was a slightly contrite background or shadows that never really existed. Still, this was far superior to seeing the neighbor's trees, or the shop's ancient workbench in the background. Having learned the lessons of the past, I now have a collapsible product table, background, and lighting equipment almost permanently set up. I can properly photograph every project at any stage I wish.