Closing the Loop - Photography and the Relevance of Print

As a landscape and travel photographer Steve Speer has had a long-term relationship with photographs on paper. Since purchasing his first camera in the ealry 1970s, he has been enthralled with the image making process; starting with 35mm transparencies and then moving into black and white film and darkroom printing. He has shot all formats from 35mm to 4x5 to 8x10 film as well as medium format to full frame to micro 4/3 digital.

In this presentation Steve will cover his chronology as a landscape photographer, preparations for being in the field, shooting for print, being in the studio and the purposeful selection of papers for a specific portfolio.

The focus of the presentation will be on his recent travels to Southern Italy where he spent six weeks shooting in Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, Sicily and Campania. He will outline his final portfolio selections and provide a “Case Study” of one of the images from start to finish.

Details will include:

• Image selection
• Paper selection
• Image processing
• Printing and final presentation in a “loose print” portfolio format.

The presentation will be very image oriented and Steve will have several printed images on display as well as his finished portfolio.

Steve Speer has been photographing the urban and rural landscape since purchasing his first camera in the early 1970s. He is a respected photographer and teacher whose work is hung in many corporate offices and private residences both nationally and internationally. He studied photography at the Alberta College of Art in the early 1980’s and returned there as a sessional instructor in 2007. He has published two photography books; one on rural China (CHINA - Guangdong Province Portfolio) and another on the visual history of commercial real estate in Calgary (Building on the Bow - Landmarks of Calgary Commercial Real Estate). He was also the profiled photographer in Freisens Printing’s prestigious, 2015 Engagement Calendar. Says Steve; “I have always enjoyed the immersive aspect of photography and that is why I was originally drawn to large format film. This format forced me to be slow and deliberate because the use of a tripod was necessary and the expense (a single image cost around $4.00) caused me to be judicious about my composition and exposures. I use digital capture now but I still employ the same methods I developed when shooting film.” For Steve, photographic art is about the vision of the photographer and the final presentation of his or her images. He says; “nothing is more gratifying than standing in front of a finely visioned, well printed and beautifully framed photographic print and being transported by that image.”

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