The Turning, Part 1

Autumna

The idea of doing an exhibition germinated last year just before Christmas, when Tiffany saw some of my photographs from autumn of 2009. She had just done an evening of Halloween storytelling at Starbucks which Fiona and I had enjoyed. We started brainstorming about how we might do it, and when we presented the idea to Friederike Schulte at the DAZ, she sounded enthusiastic about it.

Moonrise over Rotenberg

After I found out that an autumn moonrise picture of mine won second prize in the Stuttgart Marketing photo contest, I was encouraged to pursue the idea of an exhibit more seriously. Tiffany and I met with Thomas Kraut, who offered to help us along the way. He met with us several times, looked at the rooms, viewed my photographs and ultimately designed the wonderful invitations for us. He also is the father of the star of our show!

Lilith

 

Tiffany and I met regularly to show each other our work. I read her story and shared my thoughts on it with her. She looked at my photographs and told me which ones she liked best. Her illustrations were partially inspired by my pictures.

Jamie in the leaf cave

Fall

 

Another person who helped us tremendously was Jim Palik. We all knew each other from the writing workshop which we had been attending at the DAZ. Jim is a professional photographer who studied with Ansel Adams in California in the 1960s. When I got my first digital SRL in December 2008, I enthusiastically showed him the first selection of “good” pictures I had taken. He was very kind and patient in explaining how I could improve my photography.

Panorama in Beilstein

Over the next year, I learned a lot from him by seeing his exhibitions and those of his students from the HDM and by talking to him about photography. I also read and practiced a lot. I averaged about 3,000 pictures a month and post-processed nearly all the pictures with Adobe’s Lightroom software.

I still am not brave enough to use Photoshop, though I have taken some forays into some other software jungles such as Corel’s Paint Shop Pro and GIMP. In the past year I’ve learned how to do just about all the post-processing necessary in Lightroom. It’s not a perfect program, but I’ve learned to use it well.

Now a look back at my photographic history.