andy andrews

It has a delicacy of lighting, evokes all the mystery of feminine beauty and adds an atmosphere of the surreal - all contribute to a timeless statement. I keep going back to the square format and the simple, light and quiet tlrs for unobtrusive and facile coverage in portraiture. Even the huge Quadra back (72x72mm) on my RZ tempts me always, despite the horrendous cost of shooting a square out of the center of the 4x5 Quick-Load or Rapid Load or Polaroid, not to mention the weight and noise of the slr medium format. Square pictures, to me, keep the eye going round the frame, rather than having a tendency to wander off, perhaps led by long axis' drawing power.

Photographs are very person statements and can be more profound than the labored canvas, simply because of the immediacy of the medium. Our subconscious prods us, the camera is there, the moment in time is captured. Cats and people go back together millions of years. I'll leave it to the scientists and philosophers as to just what the cat's influence has been. To me, the shot works because of the square format - keeping the eye within the frame. I have trouble cropping my square images. They seem to change character when I do and not always for the better. Nice thing about a big chrome - you can hold it up to ambient light 60 years from now and be transported right back to that time and place without any intervening apparatus. I have Kodachromes from the 40s that are as bright and sharp as the day they came back to a young, impatient photographer in those yellow boxes from Kodak. I doubt my granddaughter, now 13, will enjoy a similar experience. Great photos also have another quality - They suggest to us that there is an interesting story, perhaps a mystery, about them. They invoke higher emotions, like compassion. I'd give Beau a ten on a scale of seven.

I'm partial to backlit scenes. The delicate translucency of the foliage would have been lost, had you used electronic capture. Cross-pollution between pixel wells and the loss of contrast from unfocused light rays bouncing around under the sensor cover would have made this scene impossible to capture digitally. I say this because so many have given up their film cameras and are now regretting it. There are good applications for digital capture. This isn't one of them.

Wonderfully sensitive rendition that captures the essence of nature's patterns and textures. This is a good example of a trained eye and the proper equipment coming together to perform a graphic symphony!