San Francisco Chronicle
I’m delighted to have been covered in last weekend’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, by art critic Kenneth Baker. Here is a link to the article:
Here is the article from SFGate.com:
S.F. photographer captures light eye can’t see
Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Printmaker David Avery and photographer Mark Jaremko will take part in weekend two of the San Francisco Open Studios program. Between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, they will invite visitors into their work spaces. Avery at Market Street Gallery, 1554 Market St., San Francisco. (415) 550-8299, www.davidavery.net. And Jaremko in the Fleet Room, Building D, Fort Mason, San Francisco. (650) 888-3595, www.markjaremkophoto.com.
Jaremko, who formerly led the developer group behind Microsoft Office digital imaging, now works full time as a photographer and part-time as a computer industry consultant. He spoke with The Chronicle by phone.
Q: You take photographs at night, so what do you consider to be your subject?
A: I’ve been working on an exploration of the coastline and horizon… but the pictures all have the human presence indicated in them somewhere. I don’t have any pictures that are just pure landscape.
Q: How much trial and error does your work involve?
A: It’s a six-year project so far, so there’s a lot. There are only a few days a month when I can photograph because I’m looking for a full moon. So I have a four- or five-day window. I use very long exposures – five, six, even eight minutes long. It’s almost impossible for the eye to know what the camera is going to capture.
If I go out for several hours and come back with 30 or 40 pictures, that’s pretty good.
I work with a digital camera now, so I do see what comes up on the LCD screen. It’s not color-corrected but it gives you a rough idea of whether the exposure is right. There’s a camera function called a histogram that will show you how much data you’re getting. Shooting with film, a light meter just wouldn’t tell you what you’d get, so you’d have to “bracket,” whereas with digital, it’s easy to make one exposure to tell you if you’re going to get what you need, so I can focus more on subject, composition and other factors.
Q: Why photograph at night?
A: I used to joke that when you have full-time job and two kids, night is the only time you get to photograph. But I’ve always had an interest in shooting at night. It’s an intriguing and peaceful time because there’s no one there.
Q: Does the thickness of time that a picture represents interest you?
A: I’d say yes. That’s an interesting way to put it. There’s one image I shot looking out from the Sutro Baths that has the entire ocean blanketed in white mist. It looks very calm, but the reason it looks that way is that the wind was so intense and the ocean so turbulent. On the other hand, I was out there once when it was very calm, and the resulting photograph just looked dead.
Q: Some of your pictures are almost monochromatic, how much does color matter?
A: It matters a great deal. The thing I spend the most time on is color correction. It’s not uncommon for me to do 20 intermediary prints before I get what I want to see. … You might see a light at night as white but the camera captures all the yellow that the eye cannot. In most of these scenes what the eye sees is a very dark sky, black really. If you’re staring directly at the moon, you’re not seeing a lot else. Your eye just can’t adjust to the light level, so these images try to reveal what’s there that’s difficult to see.
E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/11/PKFA1A0KO9.DTL
This article appeared on page Q – 37 of the San Francisco Chronicle
