Hudson Creative Art

About The Artist

I remember my first camera. My father gave it to me when I was about nine years old. It was a Kodak Brownie twin lens reflex. You had to wind the film through while watching the little window on the back of the camera to make sure the numbers lined up so that you could take the next picture. I think my film budget at the time allowed me about four rolls of film a year. It's difficult to improve your skills when you only see a few pictures a year from your efforts, but I can see some small improvements over time when I look at those old photographs.

My next camera was an Olympus Trip 35. Now I could take up to thirty six pictures on a roll of film and since I was now earning part-time dollars, I could afford lots more film and processing. I must have taken over two hundred pictures a year and my composition and framing were improving quickly. The Olympus was a nice little portable camera but it lacked sophistication and was almost totally automatic. You could override the f-stops but that was mostly for flash since it then preset your shutter speed for you.

A few years later and I started high school. I went straight to the yearbook photographers meetings and hoped they'd accept me on the staff. I found four other people at the meeting and one of them was there to try to pick up the only girl who showed up. After talking with the teacher in charge of the team I was given the old school Pentax SLR. As old as it was, it was a huge step up for me. It had a rather crude metering system and I soon learnt that the only good way to judge exposure was for myself. Fortunately, I now had a roll of black and white film every single day. I was taking hundreds of photos a week and then developing and printing the images in a darkroom. The learning curve was fairly steep but I jumped in and soon stared working on projects of my own. For example, I discovered that the girls in my typing class loved posing for portraits as long as you knew what you were doing, so I studied a couple of books on portrait photography and lighting and started a free portait studio next to the darkroom. I still look over some of those old lighting studies from time to time. You really can't beat black and white for a good character study.

About the same time, a newer technology was catching on. The school had a computer that we shared with another local school so we had it for one semester per year. By today's standards it was about as pathetic as you could probably go. It was an old Wang 2000 Model T valued at the time at about $20,000 if you included the dot matrix printer and card reader. I'd estimate it's equivalent to about the same as a wristwatch now. It had 8k of memory and worked of a card reader or 8" floppy disks. Yes, those numbers are accurate. I said 8k, not 8 meg. Since nobody seemed to know how it worked I decided to find out. I checked out a couple of books from our library and managed to get permission to run my programs after school. It was the beginning of a long relationship with computers that's still going on.

Fast forward a few years and I've now purchased myself a Nikon FM and a couple of lenses. The Nikon was my idea of a camera. Fully manual (that's why they called it the FM) but with a high speed center averaging meter that was excellent. I used that camera for about fifteen years before I sold it to a friend of mine. He still uses it. I am also working in sales and support for a computer company. One day we sold a system to an advertising company who ran the multi-screen display in the center of a local mall. They wanted to use it to create digital pictures to display as ads between show on the screen. I got a call from there artist who needed help with setting up and using a new graphics package called Corel Draw. I'd never used that type of software before so, once again, I dug into the books to learn how to help him. I was amazed at what could be done. I read that first manual from cover to cover and I feel like I've never put it down. I could now use a computer to create pictures. Admittedly they weren't photographs but I could create neat stuff with the computers I loved to use every day. I thought I was in heaven.

Fast forward a few years again and now I'm a network administrator for a manufacturer. They wanted a way to quickly get pictures of defective parts to a supplier in the USA. My boss and I decided to investigate the new digital cameras to see if they were up to the task so we ordered a Sony Malveca. It took images of only 640x480 and saved them on a floppy disk. It wasn't fast or especially sharp but once I used it I realized that in my hand I held the future of photography. I was only a matter of time before some lab developed a camera that rivalled film quality and took pictures at a reasonable speed.

Forget the fast forward this time, just page down a little. It was only four years later that I traded in my last film camera for a new Nikon digital camera. Film budget? I've taken thousands of images of all types and experimented with camera angles and lighting I would never have bothered with using expensive film processes. Most of my best images have been taken with this camera.

Ok, so that brings us to the present. I have thousands and thousands of images spanning decades. I've been trying to catalogue them all but it's an on-going project. If you look around you you'll notice that a lot of people who would never have been good photographers are now using digital cameras and improving at an enormous rate. Professional photographers always had one advantage over even gifted amateurs, they could take hundreds of images and select the few that were the best. That time is over. Now you need an angle to make your images stand out. Many photographers have turned to sophisticated software to make their images "pop" by changing elements of the pictures. Things like colour balance, shadows and even adding and removing items from pictures. "The camera never lies" is now such an absurdity that it's almost a forgotten saying. EVERY professionally published photo has been retouched and enhanced. I used to feel that was cheating. I had computerized graphics and I had photographs. I might change the colour balance or use an airbrush to touch up a photo but I would never deliberately change the image. Then I realized that I was the only one not using the technologies that I loved together. Ok, so I was a little slow.

The last piece of the transformation took place just last year. I was looking for a change of hobbies. Nothing drastic, just a change. I decided to try developing some skill at sketching with paper and pencil. Being a computer nut I decided to pick up a Wacom tablet and do the whole thing on the computer instead of paper. After installing the software that came with the tablet I discovered the wonderful world of Corel Painter. I've been developing my own painting techniques ever since.

If I can do something creative for you please contact me. I love this stuff.

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