Sean Duggan Blog

Dan Burkholder

Dan Burkholder  [Canon 5D]
January 29, 2009  (click in the image for a larger version)

In late January I was in south Florida at FOTOfusion, the annual festival of photography and digital imaging that is hosted by the Palm Beach Photographic Centre . One of the things that I enjoy most about coming here every year to be a presenter is the chance to see friends and colleagues from all over the country and one of the people whom I always look forward to spending time with is my friend Dan Burkholder.

Dan is a noted fine art photographer and master platinum printer. He was also a pioneer of the digital contact printing technique, creating his first digital negatives in 1992. He wrote the first book on this topic, Making Digital Negatives for Contact Printing, and it is still considered to be the definitive work on this subject. On top of all this, he is a really great guy, with a warm and generous spirit and a wonderful sense of humor. I'm always laughing a lot whenever I spend time with Dan!

In 2006, Dan's experiments with the High Dynamic Range (HDR) digital imaging technique coincided with several visits to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. The result of these explorations is an amazing new book, The Color of Loss: An Intimate Portrait of New Orleans after Katrina . This collection of 55 painterly images shows a haunting personal side to the destruction wrought by Katrina through the portraits of ravaged home interiors still filled with the belongings of the residents who fled the flood waters let loose by the breached levees.

In the Foreword, author, poet and New Orleans resident Andrei Codrescu writes:

""The wonder of these photographs is that they look like paintings, yet the objects depicted within them are not idealized. The dying domestic objects of the people to whom these interiors belong are no longer of this world. They have been captured on their journey to becoming indistinct trash. At the moment of their capture, they still looked like what they used to be, but moments after they were photographed, they no longer were anything. Their last breath of life is in these photographs; their only other existence is in the memories of their owners."

Related Links:
Web gallery of the "Color of Loss" photographs
Autographed copies of the book 
See a short video about the project
Dan's web site

Outstanding in Their Field

The Obligatory Valentines Day Image  [Canon 5D]
(click in the image for a larger version)

This was taken a few days ago here in Grass Valley. A local organic ranch is always very creative with their roadside displays. There is minimal post-capture processing on this image and all of that was handled in Lightroom. It was an obvious choice for a Valentines Day image.We have a lot more snow now (about 18 inches), with more scheduled for Saturday night and Sunday.

The next workshops I have scheduled for mid March and early April are filling up so if you're interested in attending a Photoshop class (4 of them in a warm climate!), I have classes coming up in South Florida and Honolulu, Hawaii, as well as Morro Bay, California and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow the links below for more information.

Selections, Masking and Creative Collage
Palm Beach Photographic Centre
March 16 - 19, 2009

**April Workshops in Hawaii:
Adobe Photoshop CS4: Restoration & Retouching Essentials
Adobe Photoshop CS4: Creative Digital Black & White
The Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop CS4
More Info

Secrets of the Mask: Selections & Masking in Photoshop CS4
Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging
April 18 - 19, 2009

The Creative Eye: Digital Photography & Digital Darkrom Essentials
Santa Fe Photographic Workshops
April 27 - May 1

 

The Colony

The Colony Hotel, 4:30 AM  [Canon 5D]
Delrey Beach, Florida
(click in the image for a larger version)

I returned from my Florida trip on Sunday, quite jet lagged from lack of sleep due to the fact that my airport shuttle picked me up at my hotel at 4:30 AM. Considering that I got to bed at about 1:00 AM, By the time i finally arrived home in California and got to bed that evening, I had been up for nearly 24 hours, which is enough to make anyone a bit loopy, especially after precious little sleep the night before.

So, what's a sleepy-eyed photographer to do in the wee hours when he finds himself in an abandoned and picturesque hotel lobby? Why, make some photographs, of course! In this case, I was playing around with multi-image panoramas to get the whole scope of the glorious lobby of The Colony. The image above is a panorama assembled from 7 vertical handheld shots (see below).

The initial white balance and exposure corrections were made in Lightroom and then all seven frames were selected in the Library module and opened directly into Photoshop's Photomerge command. The rest was all automated apart from some final tonal correction in Photoshop. There are a few minor glitches in the alignment of some of the ceiling beams (I will fix those later using detail from some of the individual source exposures), but overall it is very impressive at how well the automated merging turned out. Better living through technology!

I had a great time at FOTOfusion in Delrey Beach and as always, it was fun to meet up with friends and colleagues whom I only see once or twice a year. Equally satisfying was making new friends and being immersed in five days of photography in the company of many creative individuals. I'll have more to write about FOTOfusion in the coming days.

South Florida Workshop
I'll be returning to Delrey Beach, Florida March 16 - 19 to teach a 4-day class called "Selections, Masking & Creative Collage" (click the class title for more info and a registration link). This is a blend of two of my most popular classes and I'm really looking forward to teaching it in south Florida (the warm weather is an extra fringe benefit!). Space is limited so be sure to sign up soon if you are interested in joining this class.