Artist Statement
In the old days of photography, film ruled. Photographers around the world busily worked in darkrooms under the protection of red safelights turning out beautiful black and white or color photographs. However, the process itself of making these film based photographs was tedious, sometimes boring and lonely. Equipment called enlargers were used to place film images on specially treated paper and then bathed in trays of watery chemicals to produce visible images. I know of these things because I spent 10 years from 1974 to 1984 producing black and white photographs for both fun and profit.
In today’s environment, however, film based darkrooms are fast becoming a thing of the past. Like me, many photographers have embraced the world of digital photography with a passion. No longer do we have to work in lonely, unhealthy darkroom settings. Instead, we work in brightly lit digital darkrooms using computers to create the imagery and computer printers to produce the finished product. Because digital photography is fast becoming the medium of choice for amateur as well as professional photographers, a new era in photography has been born.
This new and exciting medium for creating and producing photographs has opened a whole new world for me. It has allowed me to move from the world of doing strictly black and white photography to the world of color. In addition, with the tools that digital photography offers, I’ve now been able to raise my work to a new level. That new level I call . . . Light Painting.
Simply put, Light Painting is the art of creating painting like photographs throughthe use of computer software programs such as Adobe Photoshop and other digital tools. As a Light Painter, my canvas is a computer screen and my mindset is geared toward creating extraordinary paintings rather than mundane photographs. I purposely try to create exciting artwork that cause viewers to forget that the images they’re looking at are photographs.
I sincerely hope you enjoy my Light Paintings,
Roderick Holloway
