Paper & Ink versus Pixels with Peter Krohn (NCMUG Monthly Meeting) August 16, 2011

When people first observe Peter Krohn’s, “Luminescent Botanical” images they immediately know there is something distinctively different about them. “Is this a painting? ” or “How do you get that ever-so soft light and translucence?” and also,” the fine detail and texture is quite amazing. How is this done?

The answers to these questions as well as several actual demonstrations and examples of “Paper & Ink vs. Pixels”, will be offered at our next NCMUG regularly scheduled meeting on August 16th, 2011.

The striking and unusual quality in Peter Krohn’s work is neither achieved by paint on canvas, or by a conventional camera and lens. Yet they have won accolades as Image of the Year for 2010 as well as other distinctions from the Santa Rosa Photographic Society. Instead, these images have been created on a desktop scanner with flowers and found objects from nature. Here’s how he describes the process.
“This work is an attempt to bring some small aspects of my love and admiration for the beautiful light and compositional quality present in the Old Master’s still life paintings and to blend this with the newest advancements that our Modern Master’s of technology have gifted us with for image capture, processing and reproduction. I call the process I use-- PhotoGraphica, to represent certain aspects of Photography and of Computer Graphics which have been blended to create these fine art images. Rather than a traditional camera and lens to capture these images, I use an Epson scanner and found objects from my garden and from nature that I carefully compose and arrange on the flat glass surface of this piece of equipment. When this process, which can be quite extensive, results in an inner “ah-ha”, the next steps of image refinement and removal of pollen and organic debris are achieved through amazing developments in software. Final steps in color management are to take an image illuminated by the transmission of light waves on a computer screen and accurately replicate this with a printed output where color is achieved by an entirely different means; by placing microscopic droplets of ink on absorbent paper, aluminum or canvas.

Don’t miss this “how-to-do-it-yourself” session as Peter will show the creative process step by step. He will also show how to achieve images through emulsion lift transfers on a variety of substrates, and how to create amazing effects with Die-infused aluminum.