At the age of 8 I got my hands on my first camera – Soviet-made Smena-6 – and was immediately fascinated by the miracle of capturing an image and turning it into a print. The process of developing my films and printing in an improvised darkroom was infinitely captivating. Good 30 – 35 years later, I still remember the smell of the chemicals and that unparalleled excitement of seeing the first strokes of the image appearing slowly on the paper submerged in the developer. Reading endless books about technique and composition felt like touching the world of magic.
Finding time for such an involved hobby became tougher in university and career-building years. Life took over, rendering photography merely a hobby for a long while and cutting it down to the touristy snapshots – traveled here and there, shot this and that, here is a document, you know. Immigration to Canada bit off a few years more… Then the digital era inspired a new wave in a life-long hobby, making it easier to return to photography with merely a computer which is there anyway. Trying a few digital cameras of various degree of sophistication and finally moving to a DSLR, learning the post processing almost reproduced that childhood fascination with image-making.
My specialty is nature abstracts and landscapes, with strong emphasis on unusual lighting effects and deep rich colors. Every walk in a park, on a beach or around the lake offers endless photo opportunities, be it a bright summer sunny day or a foggy autumn evening. Try to take a walk in Victoria without stumbling onto a photo opportunity!
My photos won multiple contests by Victoria and Seattle-based tourism agencies and companies. I sell some stock photos and prints. My photobook sells in many gift shops throughout the city.
One of the endless debates in the photography field leaves me cold – role of manipulation, how “pure” the photo has to be. To me, it’s a matter of what photography is for you. Is it documenting events and places? By all means try to keep it as close to the original as possible – but even in this case realize that by merely changing your angle, point of view or switching between various camera modes you already introduce your personality and your way of viewing things, thus putting “objectivity” of the shot into question. And what if you take a shot in cloudy weather while thirty minutes later sun comes out – can someone seeing a scene in 30 minutes after you left complain that your photo is not truthful enough? Or, if you clone out that unseemly patch of the dirty fur on your polar bear shot – have you distorted the truth?
Now, if photography is an art for you – then your very task is different. Instead of documenting, you want to create certain visual impression, invoke certain emotions in your viewer. As an author of the art piece, it’s yours to decide how you achieve your goal – changing your position and frame, camera settings or manipulating an image.
Links:
Photoblog: http://photography.realitytrader.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/vadym.graifer
Gallery: http://www.realitytrader.com/gallery
Photobook: http://www.realitytrader.com/victoria.html
Both beautiful works of art, but the depth and color of the first is extraordinary; it just goes on and on.
Thank you Dianat, means a lot!