The photographs
Photography is not new as a tool to produce some of the paintings seen here at riverdogstudios. A number of the paintings presented at this website began as a photograph; an instant sketch as it were: first the photo, then the drawing based on the photo, then the drawing again on the canvas, and so on. A recent example of this process is The Ohio River at Louisville - October morning that began as an photograph from an aerial photoshoot in 2005 (the Airshots folder below). The lens of the camera has been an opening, in many cases, or perhaps another road, to my painting. My Grandfather who was a pictorialist early in his career broke with this tradition of photography of the period. In the 1920s became a pioneer of modernism ( see: BRUGUIÈRE - His Photographs and His Life, by James Enyeart, Alfred a. Knoph, New York, 1977). Francis Sr. would agree that I have both photography feet in neopictorialism although you may catch an occasional tip of the hat to Ansel here and there...
Should any of the photographs in the collections catch your eye, and you would like your own print, just let us know and we will be happy to send you one. Going to the Contact link above will start the process.
For those interested in technical stuff we now use a digital Nikon D200. For decades it had been the Pentax 1000. Old reliable. As for the darkroom procedures we use Adobe Photoshop CS2 for our "visualizations." Only traditional darkroom enhancements, or their digital equivalents, are used; cropping, checking values, shadows and highlights, density, dodging and burning; all to find what caught my attention in the subject in the first place. Anyway, we don't cut and paste. My father said to me once that my grandfather told him, "...it's in the darkroom where the fun begins." This is true whether it's digital or no.
