Daniel Koretz

My photography is primarily realistic and highly detailed. While I work in a wide variety of photographic genres, including landscape, night, and architectural photography, macro photography has long been one of my favorites. Macro photography offers the allure of seeing the commonplace in new ways. Everyday things that one would often not notice at all or would pass by without any thought — the catkins on blades of dry grass in the wintertime, broken pods of last summer’s milkweeds, the shadows on individual petals of a peony — can be strikingly beautiful when observed closely. Milkweed #4, which was recently on display in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, is an image of the final seeds falling from a milkweed pod. Because the depth of field is so shallow in close-up photography, it was not possible to produce this image from a single photograph. I created it by using “focus stacking” to make a composite of 16 individual photographs that were each taken with a slightly different focus point, starting with the filaments closest to the camera and working back.

I started photography decades ago doing black-and-white wet-darkroom work, but as digital photography matured, I switched entirely to digital. Digital photography provides the photographer with a degree of control over all aspects of the photographic process, including the initial capture, developing, and printing, that is simply impossible with analog (film) photography.

Some of my work can be seen at the Salmon Falls Gallery in Shelburne Falls, MA: http://salmonfallsgallery.com/index.html.

photography.dkoretz.net

Milkweed #4

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