GrayCapsTM Digital gray card you will always have with you
Gallery Events..... Monthly Critiques

Now Available As Classroom or Individual Workstation Rental

We're offering an 11x14 inch print, matted to 16x20 and ready to frame for $195, framed for an additional $75. This print at this price is offered through Nov. 30. We'll be taking orders until then, and shipping them out by December 15th.

About the Program
Each month we offer a signed, original print, at a special price. This is a great opportunity to own a very affordable fine-art photograph. Orders are taken for a 30-day period, then printed and shipped within two weeks after the close. When it's over, it's over, these prints won't be available again at this price.

Photography is reductive, funneling a big world of human experience into a small frame of recorded light. It can be more than the original experience in detail and selectivity, but is less than the original experience in most ways. Seeing the potential to make it more, to select, distill, and therefore perhaps even intensify an aspect of the experience is where the power of photography often shines.

Photography, Time and Memory
We've become accustomed to seeing our human experiences rendered by photographs in split-second renditions. This is obviously not the human experience of time. But it has become photographic time.

To encode time in different ways, we sometimes do sequences of images, very long exposures, or even switch to video. We make much of these moments, from Cartier-Bresson's "Decisive Moment" to Harold Edgerton's very high speed stop-action work. But in photography, chasing time in human memory is elusive.

One style of photographic interpretation that has become vogue in nature photography circles is the long exposure blurred-stream turned to fog look. Originating from low light conditions and a desire for some depth of field, these long exposure shots with foggy water have become a style, a source of affectionate mystery and a photographic cliché.

My use of the scanning camera with its thousands of short exposures contained in a single frame has certainly challenged and broadened my notions of photographic time. Movement over time recorded in this way sometimes reveals patterns and rhythm of motion, other times serrating motion into a kind of tri-color cubist time.

Depth
We take in the visual experience of space with a roving eye that brings various depths into focus as we glance around. There's little awareness that our eyes are reshaping to alter the focal length of our vision and bringing differing distances into momentary focus. It is automatic and natural. The camera has no such inherent ability. Depth of field must be coaxed from the camera.

Dynamic Range
That same roving eye uses a continuously varying iris muscle to regulate light falling on the retina. A huge range of brightnesses can be accommodated within moments as our eyes dart around a scene. Such a range can be very difficult for a single photograph to record.

A Single View
The challenge of a single photographic record is to concatenate these accumulated experiences into a single frame. It can be a big challenge. We ask for a level of detail equal to what we might have seen onsite with close examination. We try to record the extremes of contrast. We try to chase the human visual experience. We want our emotional reaction to be crucial to the communication.

I often ask students if what they are trying to photograph is actually about visual phenomena. We pick up the camera with an instinct to record, but sometimes it is as much about the feeling of being in a place, rather than what can be seen. Integrating the two into the visual capture is a state where art starts to form.

A Huge Funnel
I often liken the camera to a funnel transforming the huge experience of the real world into the film or sensor's ability to record. This is, by definition a reduction, and hopefully a powerful distillation of the scene before the lens as rendered in light.

I don't have a stylistic or practical suggestion of how to easily embed non-visual experiences into a photograph, but I do think our notion of what a photograph can contain is expanding. It is common to keep journals of our experiences, which can become an obvious enrichment of the photographic experience after the fact. I now regularly record GPS tracks as I work to record real location information for each photograph. (see GPS PhotoLinker) Ever more frequently I get out my spectrophotometer and take ambient light spectral readings for later color management options. While these additions to the photographic experience don't replace simple good seeing and heartfelt response, they do have the potential to add considerably to our understanding and interpretation of the image.

Understanding what you are trying to capture, and relating that to your overall experience of the moment, then determining if it is visual, are primary starting points. Being sensitive to light, and the absence of light, using the language of photography, makes use of the camera as the interpretation medium.

* Professional Image Editing
Dec 2-5, 2006
Stephen Johnson Studios & Gallery
Pacifica, California.

This is a great chance to explore digital photographic editing with Steve. Hands-on help and demonstrations of his use of editing tools with restraint and finesse will benefit all of your digital photography work. This class is designed with the time to really understand the processes, and to work through difficult images.

Four days exploring the tools really needed by photographers for fundamental image control and finishing. Camera RAW acquisition, Color Correction, Sharpening, careful tonal control, and preserving options into archive versions of your files will be our primary concerns. Software concentration will be mainly on Adobe Photoshop, but will look at other tools as well. A number of images with various challenges will be worked through to satisfaction during the course of the day. This seminar is not about compositing or faking photographs, nor is it for beginners, as basic familiarity with Photoshop is required.

* Fine-Art Digital Printing Hands-On

This workshop focuses exclusively on improving your fine-art digital printing in our new Digital Lab, primarily using Epson inkjet printers. Concentration will be on inkjet printing with color pigments and black/gray ink combinations on coated and rag papers. Learn from the digital pioneer how he obtains his impressive results during four days of lectures, printing, and feedback in the studio.

We will cover workflow issues, color management, correcting color casts, adjustment layers, custom profile generation, editing and inspection. There being no magic bullet to making good prints, the workshop will also explore old fashioned testing, careful color judgements and interactive honing in on the best print possible.