Barry Evans

Artist Statement

When Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990, I grabbed it right away for my Mac SE (my third Mac by then!), and immediately loved it for its sheer playfulness. Later it became an integral tool for my Palo Alto professional marketing business. I’m a recovering civil engineer, and my clients then were mostly engineers, architects and contractors. Taking on-site photos usually involved compromises of lighting, weather, messy backgrounds, poor contrast, and Photoshop saved my butt too many times to count. I was also doing a lot of aerial photography, which led to my becoming quite intimate with Unsharp Mask.

These days I shoot anything and anyone. My wife Louisa and I travel a lot--the last year saw us in eastern Turkey for six weeks,;Castillo and Leon (Spain), touring on our cool new folding bikes; Mexico (where we have a home in Guanajuato); British Columbia; not to mention our backyard Marbles, Trinities and Redwoods. I’m rarely away from home without a camera--currently a digital Rebel and/or a waterproof Olympus p&s (great for kayaking!).

I post mostly to Picasa (http://picasaweb.google.com/barryevans9) and have just started uploading to Panoramio (Google Earth photo links).

It’s still all magic to me. It was magic when I printed Unicolor using a hand-rolled drum to create 8 x 10 color prints in my basement nearly 40 years ago. It’s magic now to capture a scene on a 6-ounce camera and manipulate binary code in real time on my monitor. And it’s magic that we can all access each others creations on the internet. These are the best of times, as far as I’m concerned!