I handcraft ceramic sculptures & products for sale. Fred captures stunning landscape photos, available as archival prints in our shop. We’re artists showcasing our work.
ABOUT REBECCA
I’m a ceramic artist and painter. I have been creating art in one form or another my entire life. In childhood I preferred painting and drawing to playing tag outside on a sunny day. I majored in art with a focus on clay—hand-building, not throwing on a wheel. Through life’s twists and turns, I became a television news cameraman for much of my professional career.
Working with clay is still my passion and for the past several years my full-time endeavor. I hand-build sculpture pieces and functional ware items (no wheel) from designs I create from scratch. First, an idea may pop up in my head and I sketch it out on paper. The entire process is a large puzzle that I’m always noodling on to create my products. I love color and abstract designs that bend toward whimsy and sometimes my color drawings also lend themselves to be made into prints.
ABOUT FRED
I have a love for photography dating back to the mid-70’s when I used to work primarily with black and white images in the darkroom. In the analog world, I felt black and white offered greater control and greater latitude for printing than did color. The digital world gradually changed all that. I discovered early on my preference for landscape photography and abstract images. That’s what I photograph now, in color primarily, but without the darkroom, chemicals and bulky equipment of the now distant past. Today, I rely upon my cell phone camera along with software editing tools and a color printer to turn a picture into closer to what I imagine in my mind I would like the picture to become.
In my college days, I spent countless hours taking mostly black and white landscape pictures and developing and printing them inside a darkroom. I became quite meticulous both with the picture-taking, carefully measuring exposure, setting depth of field with the aperture/shutter speed combinations and composition, etc.. As well, in the darkroom, from the mixing of chemicals to the darkroom printing techniques —largely, dodging and burning—to muster toward a better print.
Time elapsed.
About two years ago, I began taking pictures again in earnest, this time with my iPhone. It had been years since I used Photoshop (I first dabbled with this software, version 2, circa 1994) and so I took a series of online classes to learn how to effectively work with digital images. I invested in a professional inkjet printer and took a closer look at (archival) fine art paper options. There are so many great choices today, I knew that I wanted to settle on one brand with 2 or 3 different paper characteristics. Otherwise, there’s too many variables to grasp toward achieving a fully realized image. Less is often better than more, especially (for me) in photography.
Taking cellphone pictures is liberating. First, unlike my analog cameras, I have my iPhone at my side, always. That, in itself, is huge. I take pictures everywhere I go. Second, instead of looking through a 35mm viewfinder as I mostly did before, like my 4×5 field camera, I looked on a piece of glass as a screen for viewing. I see better this way.
But the biggest benefit of relying on my iPhone, it frees me from worrying too much about settings and to instead focus more on the image itself and shooting more quickly. I work more from my gut than in the past. The real work begins in photoshop after I ingest it into my computer (Adobe Bridge). Like a painter, I am able to selectively enhance the light, the detail, the colors and hone in and what I want to emphasize (subtly) and conversely, what I wish to de-emphasize.
I aim most with my finished prints to convey a sense of light and a feeling of emotion. That may sound rather bland and perhaps obvious but that’s really it. I may spend a short time before being satisfied with a print I made or I spend many hours working to get it right because I believe the image ultimately is worth that extra effort. Not to say, there are other important qualities too, color, tonal qualities, texture and design are also important. But beyond the technical, I strive toward work that invokes a feeling and not just, oh, at best, just a pretty picture.
If I were given but 5 seconds to express what I wish to achieve with my photography, it is this: to create images on paper that have soul and are of lasting value to myself and for others.