Dennis McKenzie 
A member of the photo.net community since February 03, 1999. (Give this person a gift subscription)
- Personal home page: www.birchgrovestudios.com
- photo.net Gallery Portfolio: photo.net/photos/dennismk
- This page has been visited 6946 times since January 06, 2006
Photographer Biography
I was born in 1947 in the city of San Francisco, Cailfornia USA,child of a U.S. Marine and the New Zealand women he fell in love with during the War in the Pacific. My parents settled in San Francisco after the war and raised four childeren of whom I am the oldest. Photography was my first love in the arts. When I was 16yrs. old I learned to Scuba dive and became an assistant dive instructor. My diving mentor was also a photographer who had a small darkroom set up in the back of his dive shop in San Francisco. This was the time of the Nikon F and the emergence of the SLR 35mm camera. I was hooked. I roamed the California coastline on dive trips or by hitchhiking from Big Sur to Mendocino seeking images that moved me. As well as shooting "The Haight Asbury scene" While living in the city. I did this for a number of years while working odd jobs from California to Alaska.
In 1973 I fell in love with pottery while living in Southern California. It was something I had wanted to try for some years. I finally found an opening in a summer class at Chaffy College near Upland, CA and studied with Lindley Mixon a gifted teacher who became a close friend and mentor. After a few years we returned to Alaska were I worked as a carpenter until my pottery skils were good enough and I have been a professional studio potter for the last 30 years here in the Mat-SU Valley near Anchorage, Alaska. I have shown my work at far too many gallerys and Art Fairs to mention. I now also teach pottery at my own studio near Big Lake and have been doing so for some 10 years.
I am also a sailor and have sailed here in Alaska for 20 yrs. My wife, Vickie Cole and our son David took an extended cruising trip in our own boat from Alaska to Mexico to Hawaii and back to Seward, Alaska in the years of 1989 to 1991. Now we sail mostly in Prince William Sound during the summer, trying to capture its wonders and mystery on film.
In 1999 my interest in photography was rekindled and I brought my-self up to date on the latest technology.(THANK YOU PHOTO.NET!) I learned about the "Digital Darkroom" revolution. This is how I do my own work now. I use 35mm Nikon gear and some medium format slide film and scan into Photoshop to work my images. I have just started using Nikons D70 DSLR. Which saves a lot of scanning time and film cost. Sometimes I manipulate the images very little and sometimes a lot. I print the larger prints using the Hahnemuhle collection of Fine Art Papers.
I have just started doing what I call glaze paintings taken from the pottery I make. I paint on the surface of say a large bowl with glazes and oxides and stains in a abstract manner then fire the pot in the kiln and if the work turns out good I will take close ups photos of parts of the pots that have that abstract sense of form I am trying to capture then print them on my Epson 2200 using a cavnas paper.
I wish to capture a feel of place that gives me an emotional response to the mystery of the landscape and sea interface that I love so well. I find great creativity and thus deep satisfaction working in Photoshop to fine-tune the images. My favorite images tend to be on the dark side, with large areas of black counter pointing rich areas of color and texture with an impressionistic viewpoint.
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