William Neill

"William Neill, a resident of the Yosemite National Park area since 1977, is a landscape photographer concerned with conveying the deep, spiritual beauty he sees and feels in Nature. Neill's award-winning photography has been widely published in books, magazines, calendars, posters, and his limited-edition prints have been collected and exhibited in museums and galleries nationally, including the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Vernon Collection, and The Polaroid Collection. Neill received a BA degree in Environmental Conservation at the University of Colorado. In 1995, Neill received the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for conservation photography. Neill is a member of Canon USA’s elite Explorers Of Light and Print Masters."


PHOTOGRAPHER'S STATEMENT
The reason I photograph is to experience the beauty of Nature, of wild places. I explore the essential elements of rock and tree, of cloud and rushing water to discover the magic and mystery of the landscape. My search for beauty is romantic and idealistic. It is the spirit of the land I seek-be it in a small piece of urban wildness or in vast wilderness. Rachel Carson, in her book The Sense of Wonder, writes, "Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."

Photography is a quiet, intensely meditative activity for me. Minor White, the Zen-influenced photographer, stated, "Be still with yourself, until the object of your attention affirms your presence." When the light and the subject inspire me, I am compelled to compose an image. The images that I enjoy making the most are those that rely on emotional response and perception rather than the spectacle of the scene. I enjoy isolating the details of a scene, often to the point of abstraction. By creating photographs where the content or orientation is not obvious, an intimate and enigmatic feeling can come through. I would rather make an image that asks a question than answers one, one that intrigues and arouses curiosity in the viewer.

Photographing wild landscapes, depicting an image of pristine beauty, absent of the intrusions of man, is a dangerous proposition bordering on creating a false mythology. Yet wild places do still exist. What little is left will be lost if we don't develop a new and enlightened stewardship of our earth where Nature and Man are not considered separately. Barry Lopez writes, "Wild landscapes are necessary to our being. We require them as we require air and water. But we need, at the same time, to create a landscape in which wilderness makes deep and eminent sense as part of the whole, a landscape in which wilderness is not an orphan." Perhaps the only way the world will change is for people to go through some kind of a profound aesthetic experience that makes us aware that we are personally accountable for our actions and how we affect the environment.

I can only hope that my photographs convey an enduring sense of wonder, a deep appreciation of the magic, beauty, and mystery of the natural world.



2006 doubleexposure.com interview


Galleries


www.williamneill.com

High Dynamic Range

It's not 1 word, but I have really been enjoying it.

" One of the problems of films and even more of digital sensors is their capacity to reproduce scenes with high contrast. This is characterized by blowned high-lights and/or completely dark shadows, whereas in the field, the eye discern much more tonalities. Sensors have indeed a limited dynamic range (a capacity to record variations of luminosity), inherent in technology employed. It is thus necessary in such scenes to choose between an exposure preserving high-lights, or an exposure preserving shadows. There are however solutions, but which impose certain constraints in term of shooting. We will try here to understand HDR photography and its usability."

Nicolas Genette, on August 21, 2007 NicolasGenette.com

Exploring HDR has been an interesting leap because it has breached the gap of what I felt was missing in Digital photography from film. It is very similar to the Zone System for film. An HDR image can be composed of multiple images or 1 image. When composing and HDR from a single RAW image, the similarities are more apparent. It defines the .RAW format as the closest thing we can get to a digital negative. If you shoot to correctly expose the shadows, the RAW image will contain the information to also pull out the highlights. The RAW can be used to produce multiple images at -2 -1 EV +1 +2 for example, and it can do this much better if it was shot as the +2, because the camera knows what the image looked like at 1/60 if the sensor was exposed for 1/30.

Alessandro Bavari

BIOGRAPHY

Alessandro Bavari was born in Latina, a coastal town south of Rome, Italy, on april 1963.

Grown up in an italo-french family, he was early attracted by artistic matters and decided to attend art college, where he began making photomontages at the age of 15.

Then, he studied scenography, photography, history of art and various other topics at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Rome, where he developped strong grounding in the techniques of oil, watercolours and engraving, while experimenting at the same time methods mixing tar, glue, industrial paint and exploring photographic printing techniques.

During these years, he took the habit of making numerous photographs everywhere he goes : human and animal matters, objects and architecture, pictures and landscapes, fossils and materials, which join his mental museum, also strongly influenced by indo-european cultural myths and allegories as well as 14th and 15th century artists.

Since 1993, he adds digital manipulation to his art, developping a personal artistic language using industrial and organic products from nature before incorporating photographic process, then computer digitalization, which leads to "a kind of contamination among the arts dissolving the boundaries which distinguish them".

Alessandro Bavari lives and works in Italy.

Youtube interview


Gallery


artist website

Incomplete

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Sunday Artist Highlight

Data Visualization

"Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years."

SmashingMagazine.com Data Visualization: Modern Approaches 8/2/2007


I have been searching for a way of visualizing graphical data in my work. Visualizing historical graphical data in a more aesthetically pleasing manor is an area of art that is kist now being breached. Beyond Graphs and charts. Visually pleasing presentations of any given data can hold the viewers attention longer. It can be easily interpreted or loosely based, but should uphold the data

Trey Ratcliff

"Welcome to my personal site. I have made this site to explore a bit of creative photography and writing, and I know full well that people that Google me will end up here. Others end up from my official photography portfolio at www.treyratcliff.com.

On this site, I lay about 80% of my life out there for everyone to see - friends and business associates, current and future. Most of my days and nights are spent working with the fine team at John Galt Games, but I do find time to have a bit of a creative outlet here on my blog, taking pictures and doing a bit of writing. I find it keeps me balanced.

Briefly… a photography-centric bio

I’m best well known for, well, I suppose, this site, StuckInCustoms.com, where I gets around 300,000 unique visits per month including one from my mom. In addition to this, Flickr, and other online communities, my work has been seen in the Smithsonian castle in DC, is represented by Getty, has been featured on the BBC, and has had numerous showings around the world.

I am known generally for my interpretation of HDR photography, for which I have a tutorial there on the right. I grew up blind in one eye and this might have changed the way I views the world. I don’t know. It’s hard to be objective about the way one’s brain was wired. My background is in computer science and math, so I bring an algorithm-like process to capturing the scene in such a way that it evokes memories in a palpable manner. "


Interview:
http://www.fotohacker.com/2008/01/30/interview-with-hdr-photographer-trey-ratcliff/

Getty Images is his gallery.


Artists Website: http://stuckincustoms.com/

Free Market

“For years now, we have had to listen to bankers attacking Washington for imposing regulations that inhibit the free markets from making even more money.” ~ Philip Broughton

Free-market capitalism lies shredded ... while America's confidence is badly shaken

Sept 18^th 2008 Philip Delves Broughton

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1057395/Free-market-capitalism-lies-shredded--Americas-confidence-badly-shaken.html

This relates to a subject that intrigues me, the so called Free Market. In a time when banks are being bailed out with huge government interventions and businesses that should be left to fail if they cannot develop a profitable business plan are propped up by laws that prevent their failure entirely. How can the market want it both ways? A free market has proven itself time and time again. If the market was left to it’s own devises, there would be no need for a bailout. Banks would fail, entrepaneurs would see an opportunity and start a better bank. One built on a more solid foundation instead of an assumed invulnerability. Some would succeed, others would fail. That is how improvements are made and what this country was built on.