My medium is what I would call computer-manipulated photography. I shoot all of the photographs myself. Sometimes I shoot slides, sometimes negative film. Although I generally produce the final image in black & white, I always shoot in color.
After selecting an image, I first scan it into the computer with a slide scanner. I use a Nikon Coolscan which gives me a fairly high-resolution image (approximately 24Mb) from which to work. I edit the resulting image more or less exclusively in Photoshop, although I am familiar with a whole range of different software. The plug-ins I like to use are Kai's Powertools, Paint Alchemy and the Andromeda Filter Series.
For the image on display here I primarily used Photoshop's curve and stamp functions. I first compressed the tonal range of the optimized grayscale image by applying a custom curve. Then I used the Photoshop stamp to draw the original image back in. I finally output the image at 18" x 12", 133 dpi, on a Linotronic Imagesetter.
I use a PowerMac 81/110 with 144 Mb of RAM, a Wacom Tablet, and a 200Mb Syquest Drive.
Petra Karadimas
[View Artist's Statement]
