About the photographer:
Barry Westhead developed a keen interest in black and white photography and darkroom techniques some 40 years ago, but a career in Industrial Engineering led to a hiatus from photographic art until the dawning of the age of digital imaging.
“The time will come when you will be able to make the entire photograph electronically, with extremely high resolution and the enormous control you can get from electronics, the results will be fantastic. I wish I were young again.” Ansel Adams, in his 82nd year, 1984.
Ansel had it right. With the evolution of digital photography Barry’s Industrial Engineering practice ( IPeng.ca ) converged with the advancing field of digital imaging (for which a Canadian was recently awarded a Nobel prize in physics), and a growing appreciation of nature and the outdoors.
While continuing to practice photography in commercial and industrial applications, he enjoys finding and celebrating art in simple subjects and places such as the waters and valleys of the Humber River Region. He also specializes in the art and techniques of producing accurate archival Giclée reproductions for other artists. Providing this service brings the satisfaction of combining the best technological equipment with knowledge, skill and appreciation of the work of other artists.
Running 100km each week on trails through the forests and fields of the Humber River Region with two Border Collies, provides ample opportunity for scouting future photographic images, and a gratitude for the inspiration provided by nature.
"The time will come when you will be able to make the entire photograph electronically, with extremely high resolution and the enormous control you can get from electronics, the results will be fantastic. I wish I were young again." Ansel Adams, in his 82nd year, 1984.
While many of the images here are single exposures, others are "HDR" or high dynamic range photographs more aptly depicting the full range of tones and hues of nature. The art of producing high dynamic range images involves capturing with a digital camera multiple versions of the same scene ranging from highly underexposed to highly overexposed settings.
Artful blending and tone mapping of these multiple images enables the presentation of an image that tricks the human eye into seeing what appears to be the full range of hues and brightness that would have been experienced when viewing the actual scene.
The human eye can discriminate a brightness range in a scene well beyond 100,000 : 1, while the best film and digital cameras struggle to capture a range of 4,000 : 1, and the best giclée printers and fine art papers can barley achieve a range of 250 : 1.
The essence of high dynamic range photography is to emulate with canvas and ink the “tricks” the Old Master painters developed centuries ago to achieve radiant colours and “glowing” skin tones using just the available colour palette of the oil-based pigments of their day. The masters learned to use colour combinations and contrasts that would make our eyes see the paintings as we perceive reality. As Picasso observed, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
Several fields of technology and skill must be mastered and controlled to produce this type of high quality fine art giclée print.
Ansel 's mentor Alfred Stieglitz, put it this way; "I offer the print as the equivalent of what I saw and felt."
What is a Giclée Print?
Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a term for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word “giclée” is derived from the French language word “le gicleur” meaning “nozzle”, and the verb “gicler" meaning “to squirt or spray”. It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial “Iris proofs” from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries to denote such prints.
View Samples:
Studio / Gallery:
Kleinburg, ON
Canada
Phone: 905 624 3780
Fax: 1 866 730 3990
BWesthead@Art2PrintImages.com
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