Previous
 
Photographic Images by Emanuel Strauss
 
 

Biography:

I was born in the 50's and grew up on Long Island about 20 miles from Manhattan. I was the "baby" in the family. Being the youngest has certain advantages, not the least of which is having a fully formed support network in place when you arrive on the scene. I have two older brothers and one older sister.

Introduction to Photography:

Photography was something that I actively avoided for a number of years. Whenever it was offered to me, I would always consciously reject it. I associated photography with mixing chemicals and working with foul smelling solutions. All of this changed when my uncle literally dragged me down to his darkroom when I was around twelve or thirteen and showed me how to make a black & white print. From the moment that I saw my first image appear in the developer tray (like a polaroid) I was hooked!

I spent the better part of my teenage years (to the consternation of my mother) wedded to my own dark room on the sunniest, brightest days of the year instead of being outside in the fresh air. My father had a Nikkorex camera with a 43 - 86mm zoom lens which I appropriated as my own. A wonderful lens to start with, to be able to experiment with slightly different focal lengths. Later I saved by money (earned at the local Baskin & Robbins Ice Cream store) and bought my first camera... a Nikon FTN with 50mm, 28mm, and 80 - 200mm lenses.

Education: The only formal photographic schooling I ever received was a year that I spent at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan. There I basically learned a framework for all that I had already taught myself and one thing that was totally new to me and was probably the most important technical lesson to be learned..... I learned about light and the zone system of exposure compensation. The most important piece of equipment I have ever bought was easily the Pentax 1 degree spot meter with which I took light readings off of everything I saw, and gained a real appreciation of the light which was all around me. I became aware of not only the quantity of light occurring in an image, but also the varying qualities of that light, hard or soft, direct or indirect, etc.

 

I also gained an appreciation of the marvelous qualities of the human eye and it's ability to handle an incredible range of lighting conditions within the same image.

In the intervening years I have worked as a waiter, a telephone salesperson (selling industrial chemicals over the phone), A New York Taxi driver (for 5 years - absolutely the best real-life education one can receive), met and married my wife, gone back to school to learn some computer programming skills, and worked in the business world for around forty years in order to help support our family of three boys, two cats, and one dog.

Focus on Photography:

My life changed again on September 11th 2001. I was working in the travel industry for a Spanish travel agency wholesaler and was in Barajas airport in Madrid on that afternoon (local time), a half hour before boarding (3:30 pm) when all hell broke loose. After five days captive in Madrid, the airspace over the U.S. finally opened up and I was finally able to return home...I kissed the ground upon disembarking at Newark airport. The travel business in which I was working was devastated.....

I was introduced to the digital photographic world while I was visiting one of my oldest friends, (also a photographer since our teen years) on vacation. I started learning as much as I could about scanners, printers, and most of all Photoshop! Like a color lab on my desktop! As it is said, as one door closed, another door was opened...... I have since spent much time and effort learning how to use Photoshop in the process... and have not had as much enjoyment and pleasure since my days learning my first darkroom skills.

A few courses in web design have led me to my first pages on the web and the presentation of these images to you. ...I have always been entranced by everyday images; images that you may see out of the corner of your eye, images that are either always there and taken for granted or fleeting views that occur in the blink of an eye an then are gone...With the advent of Cell phones and the ever increasing amount of detail captured by their sensors the facility of capturing fleeting images has exploded and almost a 20% of the images I capture today are taken via "smart" phones - currently I am using a Galaxy S22Ultra to complement my Fujifilm XH-2 and 18mm to 135mm zoom lens.