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Submitted by mimi 06/14/10 7:49 PM GMT
As summer is in full swing in our northern hemisphere, I present to you our next artist to be spotlighted. His love of the animal kingdom is evident not only by his biography but by his images. Here is garrettparkinson uniquely known as Garrett! Please view his gallery and sprinkle it with comments!
My love of animals and nature began at a very early age. As a toddler I would spend hours in the garden catching bugs and putting them into plastic containers. I can remember sitting in my grandmother’s lap looking at National Geographic magazine. As I grew, I moved up to tadpoles, lizards and mice. I loved to watch anything about animals on the television; Zoorama, Wild Kingdom, old travelogues. Tarzan and Jungle Jim rocked!
When I was about 8 or 9 my father built a Coi pond in our front yard. I immediately stocked it with anything I could catch. I don’t think that my father intended it to be used in that manner, but he let me do it anyway. Before family vacations, I could be found in the Coi pond, practicing my creature catching skills with both bare hands and net. When we returned from a vacation our car was always filled with jars and buckets of algae, tadpoles, fish, lizards, snakes, whatever….And of course you know where all of that stuff went……into the Coi pond.
Around 11 my interests in scaled creatures spread into feathers and fur. I began bird watching with the Audubon society and was now raising squirrels, opossums and foxes. I raised and sold mice to pay for food and shavings. I spent entire Saturday mornings cleaning cages. The squeaking of exercise wheels could be heard 24/7 and the smell………
In high school my uncle gave me my first camera. It was a used Yashica. I spent hours with my high school biology teacher bird watching, pressing plants and taking pictures. Nothing noteworthy. Trust me. My interest in photography was just budding.
After high school I was accepted to Humboldt State University. After seven long years and a divorce I had my degrees in Zoology and Wildlife Management. My mother bought me my first new camera, a Minolta, to take to Wyoming with me. It was my first and only job as a Wildlife Biologist. I was lucky most wildlife graduates did not find work. Affirmative action had just been instituted by the government and I was a white male. Living in the wilderness 24/7 gave me lots of opportunity to photograph animals. Again, nothing noteworthy, but out of hundreds of slides maybe a couple good images.
Time goes by and somehow I end up selling insurance with my father. If you would have told me out of college that I would be selling insurance, well………I did get something though, income. After 10 years of struggling to I build a book of clients, suddenly I had the ability to travel. My wife and I first went to Costa Rica, then to Borneo and then the Amazon. I selected all of the places that I studied in college. I
wanted to see as many rare animals as I could before they were gone. I took lots of pictures, but again nothing noteworthy. I could never get close enough to my subjects.
Out of frustration I went to a popular camera shop looking to see how much a large lens would cost for my Minolta,(I was expecting a bonus check). The counter person told me that they did not carry large Minolta lenses, but he did have a used Nikon 600mm f4 manual lens and a used Nikon f4 camera body that he would sell to me for $2,500.00. I wasn’t expecting to pay that much money and I had to scrape up the last couple hundred dollars. Have I mentioned I have a really cool wife? Little did I know it was the deal of a lifetime. I have never looked back. I have since upgraded my camera body to a Nikon D2X, but my 600mm f4 is the heart of my photography. It was formerly used by a newspaper and was beat to #@&*#! It looked like hell, but the glass was good. I have learned so much about birds and their behaviors using that lens.
In addition, I started taking some photography classes at a local learning center. One of the courses was black and white photography. I always wanted to learn how to develop and print film. After spending hours and hours in the darkroom burning and dodging I started to figure out that if I took a shot a certain way I didn’t have to burn or dodge as much. I started to think more about light and the direction of light.
Fast forward to the fall of 2008, I was purchasing a new down sleeping bag for a Sierra backpacking trip and got into a discussion about photography with the sales- person. He suggested a website to post images and have discussions about photography. The site was caedes.net. I checked the site out and it seemed simple enough to join. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.
I do not know if this is the same for everyone that finds Caedes, but I became absorbed. Feedback! I got feedback. You post an image and suddenly people are talking to you about your image. I don’t do Facebook. I am not sure I could Tweet, but I do like to take pictures of animals and talk about photography. We were talking about grain, and light. I was getting help with borders and off-centering. As I listened and struggled I found myself becoming more aware. My shots were becoming less impulsive and more thought out. Having a critical audience made me think about an image before I posted that image……….is the background in too busy, have I submitted that subject too often…… too bright, too dark…… Whoa! This person commented on my image…… Whoa! No body commented on my image.
I have said this before but my perception of photography is awareness. Caedes provides a backdrop for photographers of varying abilities (or awareness) to post and share. It is a continuum. On one end, the very aware and on the other, not so much. We all find ourselves as points along this line. And the most interesting thing is that when you throw in perception these points get reorganized and can shift in either direction. I think that what is most important, is that over time listening to friends (and friends to be), my point on the line (or my awareness) now attracts a broader group of people. Thank you for selecting me.
