PHILIP CARNAHAN

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Philip Carnahan

   I began this hobby when a family friend and photographer took me under his wing as a very young Boy Scout fulfilling the requirements for a Photography Merit Badge. He gave me a simple camera that had a shutter speed dial, aperture ring for f-stops and a film speed settings (back then, ASA). Bonus, he even had a ‘dark room’ to process the film and turn those negatives into prints. 

     Love was trouncing and slogging around the Oregon woods, hiking through the mountains and myriad of stunning northwest lakes that our frequent camping trips took us on. And thru this, I learned to transition film into the story.

     Fast forward to completing multiple degrees (OSU-yes, I go Beavers) one in science that subsequently has allowed me to better understand the beauty and complexities of the human eye as it relates to the limitations of current image sensors. As an example, the eye has a dynamic range three times greater than today’s best camera sensor. So photographers utilize methods of seizing the full extent of what we see and turn it into a photograph that encompasses that complete dynamic range. HDR or high dynamic range photography does exactly that. We take multiple exposures of the same subject. One exposure of the shadows, one of the highlights and one in-between, all with different setting and then stack them together in post processing culminating with a single beautiful image.