DIGITAL ARTIST – Currently I would describe myself as a digital artist.  My art is created using a computer screen as a canvas, a computer mouse as a brush and pixels as my paints.

What I create generally begins with something I can focus a camera lens on.  I then manipulate what I capture, resulting in images that range from stark realism, to fantasy, to abstraction beyond any resemblance to earthly reality.

More than seven decades ago as a child I became a photographer when my older sister gave me a small Kodak camera as a birthday gift.  For more than 50 years I studied the physics of light and optics, and the chemistry of light receptive elements while first using black and white and later color analogue film to record what I saw around.  Even then I would occasionally experiment with going beyond reality to create images from my imagination, by using darkroom magic and hand colorization rather than simply documenting my surroundings.

Digital photography moved into the mainstream at the time my career as a studio photographer was coming to an end.  Though reluctant at first, once I dipped my toes in the digital pool, I quickly embraced the new world and the expanded opportunities to bring the images in my mind to the realm of reality.

It was then I became a “Digital Artist.”

Dave Michael