C A Brackett Photography

Artist's Statement

Digital:

All of the work I have exhibited on this site was captured with an 8 megapixel high resolution Canon SLR digital camera. Most of it was captured and encoded into jpeg files in the camera, but an increasing proportion of my work is being done in Raw mode, where no in-camera processing is done and where there is no compression. The reason for going to the raw mode is to give the control over the processing to me rather than the camera. For example, the use of Raw in making the several exposures of the Torch Lake panoramic turned out to be crucial to achieving the even tones required in the extensive clear sky. The jpeg version of these files could not be color balanced in a consistent way.

Digital photography will soon be all there is, mostly, but it carries with it a stigma of "point-and-shoot" and push-the-button-to-print mentality. This is not an informed understanding of the way digital is being used today by professionals and serious photographers. Both straight classical image treatment and artistic image interpretation require as much input from the artist/photographer as did the older wet-chemical processing techniques. The advantages of the digital process include more precise control over the image treatment, whether for traditional interpretations or more abstract treatments or manipulations.

My own work is mostly done with a straight, traditional approach. However, as in my cone flower series, it is enlightening to explore the new views and expression that can be found with a digital abstraction. It should be noted that there is almost nothing new in the digital bag of tricks: almost all of them are modeled on techniques that have long been used in the traditions of photography and the printing industry.