RT
photographers have long fooled the eye with burning and
dodging, effects that make portions of photos lighter or
darker during the film development process. But with the
advent of digital image editing, the 1990's produced a cottage
industry of photo retouchers and compositors who altered
photos for artistic or illustrative effect. Among the new crop
of digital manipulators was Dan Doerner, 41, who studied
photography at the State University of New York at Albany,
learned literally to cut and paste images in a darkroom to
create collages, and eventually worked with an early version
of Adobe Photoshop in 1989 while living in Los Angeles.
"At the time there was no way to print out those images,"
he said. "You could only show people what they looked like on
the screen." While in Southern California, Mr. Doerner
cemented his reputation as a digital manipulator by doing
cover designs for Mac Digest and went on to do various covers
for Publish and MacWorld magazines after moving to San
Francisco, where he now lives. Most of his art comes from the
back end of the photographic process, taking photos and
creating a collage of unsettling and impossible images — a
tuba player walking on water, or a floating cube of
clouds.
When Mr. Doerner picked up his first digital camera last
year, a low-end Olympus D100 (about $250), it brought back the
joys of photography. Using the slow-synchronization flash
mode, he could shoot pictures at night with the flash
illuminating the end of the exposure, for a light-streak
effect. After attending the Burning Man arts festival in the
Nevada Black Rock Desert, he earned the nickname Digital Dan
from the Cyberbuss Camp, a group of latter-day merry
pranksters. When the group's silver-painted bus reached Point
Arena, Calif., for the town's Independence Day parade in 2001,
Mr. Doerner was there to capture collages for his Web
site.
One of the most stunning is a night shot of the Cyberbuss
itself, in a composite with a man who shot fireworks off his
helmet. Mr. Doerner's Photoshop collage of the low-resolution
photos shows the possibilities with a point-and-shoot camera
and some ingenuity.
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