PETER CORBETT PHOTOGRAPHY

Some of these people I know – my wife, my friends, but most I captured unposed just being patient and observing. There are no formal portraits here.

As a commercial director, spent hours trying to capture the “magical moment” when a child actor expresses delight at the yumminess of a snack. Some of this photographs are my grandchildren, but for most images, I just watched and waited for the moment.

Maybe my favorite images. I live close to a magical woods in Westchester, NY called the Leatherstocking Trail. The woods are may a few hundred yards wide, but wind several miles through 2 towns. The trail is quite wild with winding streams and overgrown paths. Here, I’ve seen foxes, deer, woodpeckers, snakes, ducks chipmunks and of course squirrels. I’ve been able to photograph all 4 seasons – often in macro detail. These from the bulk of this group of images

I’m a sailor and so the opportunities to capture some scenes are always present. Trying to find a unique approach that avoids the cliché is always the goal, but rarely achieved.

This collection is entirely accidental. We went on an African safari and was rewarded with just great opportunities. Others happened by lucky accident of being in the right place at the right time like the fox.

This is really my photographic background. I lived in the studio, and spent hour upon hour carefully lighting miniature sets with an array of specialized lighting tools as well as highly skilled lighting technicians who rigged them. Recreating this in stills as a one-man-band with limited gear is challenging. However the joy of learning to be a “power user” of Adobe’s Lightroom gives a photographer tools that are transformational.

Various photographs of objects mostly as well as one of the photographs I took using a light painting technique I was experimenting with at the time

I was born in apartheid South Africa and last year I was finally able to visit Robben Island where Mandela and the many who resisted apartheid were held for decades. An ex-prisoner from the time Mandela was in jail, was a tour guide. Traveling through Europe we saw the symbols of the holocaust in Amsterdam – including Anne Frank House (where all photography is strictly forbidden). We also visited Terezin the concentration camp in the Czech Republic as well as the original site of the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. Finally some images from the aptly named “Terror Háza Museum” in Budapest. This building was the heart of the communist repression where victims were imprisoned, tortured and executed.

Identifying a number of photographs where the color red stood out and where, in a couple of cases I experimented with draining the color of the rest of the image, leaving only red.