Image Title: Lucien's Fence
Image Size: 10x15 inches on 13x19 inch paper
Created: 1997
Medium: Pigment Ink Print

About The Work

In the spring of 1997, I was driving my son, Luc, to school. As we passed Somesville, a small village five miles north of Southwest Harbor, Maine, I glanced to my left and saw this photograph developing before my eyes. "Lucien," I said, "You're going to be late for school today. Don't worry, I'll write a note." I pulled out my 4x5 Wista with a 150mm Protar lens and made four negatives on Tri-X film. The photograph shows a fairly common type of fog condition that occurs in spring and early summer mornings along the Maine coast. This morning, the sun was glancing through the fog at a very low angle, adding to the beautiful nature of the light in the image. Recently, I scanned the original negative with my Epson V750 Pro and achieved excellent results scanning at 100% and the maximum optical resolution of the scanner. I then cropped out the very bottom of the image, which showed part of the road.

The most difficult part of getting this image to match my perception of the scene was darkening the sky. This allowed me to blow out the fence posts so they were completely. This extreme whitening of the fence makes the print glow. Other local controls helped to separate the midtones, all of which needed to be suppressed so I darkened them as an entire group. Such visual challenges take time to see in order to bring out the mood of any subject, and this one was perceptually more difficult than most because of the intricate local grayscale manipulation.

About the Artist

George DeWolfe has been a photographer since 1964. He studied with Ansel Adams and Minor White in the 1970's and holds an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. George has published widely, most notably At Home In The Wild, on New Hampshire's White Mountains edited by David Brower, George DeWolfe's Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop and B&W Printing have received wide acclaim. He has had fifty one-man exhibitions, is in several permanent collections, is currently a consultant to Epson, Adobe, Hahnemühle, X-rite, and Nik and was one of the original 15 photographers on the Adobe Lightroom team. He teaches The Digital Fine Print Workshop, B&W Master Print, and Contemplative Photography throughout the United States. His most recent book, B&W Printing, details the creation of a B&W Masterpiece. He developed Optipix and PercepTool, Adobe Photoshop plug-ins. His most recent honor was Award for Artistic Excellence presented by The National Park Service. George has photographed for many environmental organizations over the past 40 years: Appalachian Mountain Club, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Mass Audubon, National Park Service, and Friends of Acadia. George's passions are teaching visual and digital photography skills and photographing the mysteries of the world. He combines the structure of ancient Chinese landscape painting with the structure of Western landscape genres to achieve his mysterious style. He plays the 5-String Bluegrass banjo.

www.GeorgeDeWolfe.com