June 2002
President's
Message
Focus On...
Focus On...
Elisabeth Bard
I began my career trying to
decide whether I wanted to be a musician or an artist. Or both by combining
the two disciplines in the theatre. Art won out, particularly after deciding
that theatre was a 24 hour occupation and all the people in it were crazy.
One of my greatest delights was the study of photography. I did not expect
this. However, spending nights in the darkroom was an intense and greatly
satisfying pleasure. My first camera was a Pentax with a spectacularly
good lens, with shots that were rivaling view cameras in sharpness. I
still wish I had that camera, but it was stolen by a fellow student. That
person knew a good thing when they saw it. I replaced the Pentax with
a Canon FTB and that is the same camera that I still use today.
FOCUS on Elisabeth Bard
After getting married, I was able to work in the field, processing photos for a studio in Dayton, Ohio. The work entailed photos for student yearbooks and senior photo packages. After a year of this work, I moved to another photo studio in Dayton, where I got to do more exciting processing. This was at the beginning of RC paper and developing with photo machines. Those models certainly were nothing like what is available today. The black and white machine produced some of the worst photos imaginable, at least to someone who likes good black and whites in a print. Because the machines were new and so much cheaper to run, the studio ended up getting rid of hand processing. For my own pleasure, I was able to use the darkrooms at my husbandís school.
Then we moved to Puerto Rico and started a family. I had no time, energy or money or facilities I could use. After returning from PR (I spent 5 years there), I discovered that PCs had taken over the world. I entered the graphics industry to earn my living and spent over 20 years in this field. My experience entailed everything from typesetting to design, including image selection and manipulation. As far as computers went, everything was learned by hands-on trial and error. Photoshop was my favorite program and I even went so far as to take classes in image manipulation at Moore College of Art and Design, which my daughter is currently attending. Toward the end of this period, I came back to photography as a serious pursuit, spurred on by a friend at church. I wish I had never put the camera down. Thank God for my graphics experience, because I learned SO much about how to use the programs, even for specialized color correction (this is an art, NOT a science!). While I would absolutely love to be able to have a darkroom to do black and white, I am finding using the computer to be as much fun and as fulfilling as the darkroom. It is also just as time consuming, too!
One of my other greatest pleasures is teaching other people, particularly beginners, how to use Photoshop and other software. I can still remember how difficult it was to learn all the ins and outs of the software and terminology, (which is certainly not in English) and that was back when it was a lot easier, except that Photoshop had NO history and NO layers. You had to be really sure what you did was what you wanted, because there was only one chance to undo it!
I have since added a Canon AE1 body to my collection, so that I can use two cameras at once. Once digital comes down in price and goes up in quality and storage space for Hi-Res images, I will be looking to invest in a system. But that is a few years down the road I think.