John Shankle - Photography

In high school I was very active with the camera and in the darkroom and was the photographer for the school newspaper and yearbook. My main interest was sports photography which reached a high point when I covered the national track and field championships at Madison Square Garden. Quite an experience at sixteen, wandering around with my press pass, down on the floor in the middle of the action. After my school days I entered the world of engineering, industry and business and only took the usual candid photos for the next 47 years. In my business I got into desktop publishing and the production of our sales literature and catalogs. This exposure to the graphic aspects of the personal computer laid the foundation for things to follow. In 1995 I retired and moved to Cambria.

With freedom from business and engineering I now was able to enjoy the magnificent countryside and life in our village. I started carrying my camera with me at all times here and abroad and began capturing images of interesting subjects, first on film and then on digital media. Photography in the digital era put me back at square one to learn the new way. All the old principles were the same but film was replaced with pixels, the dark room was replaced by the computer, Photoshop and ink jet printers. Mastering the technology was not that easy, especially Photoshop, but neither was the darkroom in the old days. This technology makes it possible to combine artistic imagination and captured images to compose pictures which otherwise would not be possible. Enter my wife Toddy, an accomplished artist. She has tried to instill the principles of composition, light, and color into my photography with some success but I feel I still have a lot to learn.

I am basically a candid photographer, shooting what I think are interesting subjects as I come upon them. On occasion, I have an idea for a subject and will purposefully compose it and shoot it. Vespers is an example of this. In addition to taking straight photographs, I do a fair amount of digital manipulation, taking different objects from my photo library and composing new photo art. For example, the sky in the Cambria East Village Mural comes from above Lake Meade and the east village is composed of seventeen individual photos merged together.

Currently I am shooting a Nikon D60 with a 18-200mm superzoom lens and a Nikon S8000. I prefer the viewing through the lens of the SLR D60 which is optimum for composition and framing but itÕs large size does not lend itself to having it at hand all the time. I keep it with me when traveling and use it whenever I can. The S8000 is pocket size and goes with me the rest of the time. It has about the same zoom and resolution characteristics as the D60 but the digital image viewing on the back of the camera is difficult at best in bright sunlight.

NOTE: Generously, 100% of the sales from this exhibit will benefit the Cambria Library New Building Fund.