Thursday, April 19, 2018

George Barr
Fine Art Photography

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About George Barr

George Barr

 

George Barr is a family physician living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. George started photography at age 12 and has experience with 35 mm. medium format, large format and most recently digital. His main interest is in landscape, and industrial concentrating on the middle ground.  George spent most of his life only shooting black and white but now shoots both colour and Black and White since going digital.

A Personal Philosophy

(or why I photograph and what I try to achieve)



Calling it a philosophy is definitely giving the concept delusions of grandeur when it comes to why I photograph. Like many before me I was a hobbyist, enamoured more of the process than the picture. But if you study the technical, you can't help but be exposed to the artistic, and somewhere along the line, that became more important to me than the camera.It was a long painful process with many blind alleys but for many years now I have appreciated the fine image. FIrst I learned to appreciate the fine points of composition, the relationship of the various parts of the image, to each other and to the edges of the image. In time, I used what I'd seen to compose my own images ever more carefully. I first saw, then attempted to replicate the subtle tonalities of a fine print. I tried to capture the grand landscape in dramatic lighting, but had neither the time nor the energy to do it as well as many others. I found I could do more with the more ordinary, the mundane, the overlooked. This often involved what I call the middle landscape, neither close up, nor miles away. My usual subjects are most often within a stone's throw of my camera.

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Ancient History

1st Camera

My first camera was the medium format Zeiss Ikonta, given to me at age 12 because I'd received my first darkroom equipment and I could make contact prints fro these 6X6 cm. negatives. At this point I was more interested in the process than the art, though it didn't take long before I discovered Ansel Adam's series, "The Camera", The Negative" and so on and that led to looking at good images and as they say, the rest is history. I roamed the back alleys and the river valley in Edmonton and frankly didn't take any photographs worth remembering.

In high school I photographed for the yearbook and needed something a bit "sportier" and purchased a Petri 35 mm. rangefinder camera and used it throughout high school to photograph everything from dances to football - hardly ideal for the latter, but you work with what you can afford and interestingly it wasn't all that bad. Sure you could only catch the plays on your side of the field, but that would usually provide enough images for the purposes and there's something to be said for images in which the whole play can be seen.

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Biography

I'm a 59 year old photographer, taking pictures since age 12. My first efforts were with a Zeiss Ikonta my father gave me. It was pre WWII and with an uncoated lens, but it worked and took good photographs. I made contact prints in the basement bathroom. One thing lead to another and eventually I had a fully working darkroom and have had a working darkroom pretty much since. This included a darkroom with no running water while doing my residency in family practice. That was a challenge. In high school I took all the photographs for the year book, shooting dances and basketball, hallway activities and just about anything else to do with the school. Again in university I was involved with and eventually ran the Photo Directorate which was responsible for photographs for both the university newspaper and the year book.

I was able to earn some money in university shooting team photos and residence floors, learning how to make hundreds of prints efficiently. Eventually though I had to buckle down and actually study if I wanted to get into medical school and photography took a back seat though never totally out of mind. I continued to use the Zeiss Ikonta and then the Yashica 124

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