.overflow_x_hidden {
overflow-x: hidden;
background: #000000;
}
#page-footer {
background: #ffffff;
}
.image img {
max-height: 100%;
max-width: 1400px;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
display: block;
}
.img_caption{
max-width: 1400px;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
color: #fff;
}
.overline{
color: #fff;
}
.article.header h1 {
color: #fff;
}
.article.header h2 {
color: #fff;
}
.byline{
color: #fff;
}
.affiliation{
color: #fff;
}
.date{
color: #fff;
}
.time{
color: #fff;
}
.dropcap {
color: #fff;
}
.html-render{
color: #fff;
}
.paragraph p {
color: #fff;
}
.paragraph h1{
color: #fff;
}
.paragraph h2 {
color: #fff;
}
.paragraph h3 {
color: #fff;
}
.paragraph h4 {
color: #fff;
}
.paragraph h5 {
color: #fff;
}
.paragraph h6 {
color: #fff;
}
.divider {
border: 0;
border-bottom-color: currentcolor;
border-bottom-style: none;
border-bottom-width: 0px;
border-bottom: 2px solid #fff;
clear: both;
max-width: 150px;
margin: 40px auto;
}
.paragraph a, p a:hover {
border-bottom: 2px solid;
color: #fff;
}
.paragraph p a:hover {
border-bottom: 2px solid;
color: #a8a8a8;
}
.comments-toggle {
color: #005dc7;
background: #fff;
}
.comments-container {
font-size: 12px;
line-height: 14px;
border-bottom: 2px solid #ddd;
margin-top: 40px;
margin-bottom: 40px;
padding-bottom: 24px;
background: #fff;
}
.sharebar_comment_count{
color: #fff;
}
Photography has been a lifelong passion that began with my dad teaching me the basics, including processing the film and making slides, to record our family vacations. In high school, I joined the yearbook team as a photographer, capturing the highlights of our school’s sporting events. Those early years provided a strong foundation and enduring interest in photography.
After vacationing and living in Colorado on and off since childhood, I made Gilpin County my home in 2016 with my wife and business partner Amy Skinner. As the Business Director of Peak to Peak Counseling I’ve put my three decades of work experience within the hospitality industry and customer service to use serving our local community. Since 2021, I have enjoyed taking photos for Amy’s monthly mental health column, sharing some of my favorite images from the Peak to Peak area, around Colorado, and across the globe.
Whether hiking, traveling, honing my skiing skills, enjoying a local concert or theater performance, I love capturing special moments on my camera to share with you.
If you’re interested in photography and are trying to figure out where to start or how to grow, you’ve come to the right place. There’s a lot of information out there, how do you even determine what to focus on? Sometimes in trying to do too much we find ourselves accomplishing nothing.
Photography is both technical and creative. That’s part of what I love about photography because we can always improve our technical skills and our creative range. In fact, when we work on both simultaneously they can have a compound effect with our increasing technical skills making us more capable or increasingly creative challenges.
In this article, I’m going to help you start with what you already know and what you love about photography. Then, we’ll talk about how you can grow by learning more about light, composition, or your photography gear. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we’ll talk about taking risks so that you can continue to grow creatively.
Let’s start simple. Let’s start with what you know. If you can identify why you are interested in photography you’ll be on your way to not only getting started but getting started the right way.
For example, if you love capturing fleeting moments then you’re better off approaching learning the technical skills with that in mind. You might not think you care about understanding various lighting techniques until you start to see how they can improve your ability to accomplish your personal goal.
The best way to get started in photography is to reflect on why you’re interested in the art. What do you think makes a great photo and what types of photos inspire you the most? Keep that in mind as you’re learning, you probably know more than you think about what makes a great photograph and you can use that to determine how to take one.
As I mentioned above, if you take some time to reflect on what makes a good photograph you can start to break down the process you need to learn. Starting with what you love to photograph will be the fastest path to learning. For example, if you love shooting wildflowers because you love the vibrant colors and bringing small things to life then you’re already learning about color and scale.
Additionally, when you start with what you love you can choose which photography concepts are going to be most important to you in the short term. There are some aspects of photography that might not interest you. However, you might find that you come back to them later when you reach a point of knowledge and skill where the information might be useful to you.
Learning any new skills is about the journey and the process. The more you can enjoy the process the more motivated you will be. There’s a lot to learn so do what inspires you to keep learning.
You can practice your photography skills even when you don’t have your camera in front of you. Notice the light as you go about your day or pay attention to composition and design of everything from the ads you see in a magazine to the way your friend decorates their house.
If you learn to see light and design in everyday things, you’ll be able to practice them in your photography. You can be intentional too but setting little challenges for yourself to practice one new technique and then another until you have a full toolbelt of techniques that you know how to use. Again, don’t focus on learning everything at once but start with what interests you.
Maybe today you want to practice silhouettes and then next week you want to play with leading lines. And then the following week you might see if you can incorporate both techniques into one photo. If you open yourself up to constant learning you’ll never get bored by all the ways you can combine photography techniques.
At some point you’re going to have to learn more about your gear. Maybe you’ve beat me to that and you’re a gear nut that reads every user manual ever. But if you’re not you can remind yourself that learning technical things will help you accomplish more inspired ideas and open more creative doors.
You’ll want to learn how your camera works and understand the exposure triangle: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Also, understanding how to edit your photos can make you better too because you’ll know what’s possible in post-production. Play with different lenses and focal lengths and see how you can create different looks and feels from your work.
There’s a lot to learn and even things that you may dismiss as unimportant to you now might prove interesting later on in your photography journey. For example, you might think you always want a fast shutter speed so that your images are sharp until that day you see a waterfall and wonder how it would be to create that creamy water look. You don’t know until you try.
And speaking of trying, don’t be afraid to. Try things that don’t make sense or things that sound silly or cheesy. The more you try new and different things, the more you learn.
Sometimes you’ll learn what doesn’t work and that’s great too because it might give you a clue to something else that does work. Or it might simply solidify a lesson in your head. Sometimes the best way to remember something is by making the mistake in a memorable way.
Have a mindset that there are no bad ideas. There might be bad results from an idea, but sometimes those bad results teach you exactly what you need to know to come up with the next best idea. Combine different things that you know in different ways and see what you come up with, maybe it’ll suck but it sounds like fun and it sounds like growth.
About the author: Brenda Bergreen is a Colorado wedding photographer, videographer, yoga teacher, and writer who works alongside her husband at Bergreen Photography. With their mission and mantra “love. adventurously.” they are dedicated to telling adventurous stories in beautiful places.
The second annual Page Fine Art Festival comes to John C. Page Memorial Park this Saturday, April 15, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The festival will feature around 40 artist booths, as well as food vendors, a Native hoop dance performance at 11 a.m. and live music at 1 p.m.
The festival kicks off this Friday with the Best in Show Art Event at Wahweap Marina from 6-9 p.m. At that event, each artist will display one of their own artworks, and each person who buys a ticket to attend will be able to vote for the best art. Ticketholders will also have the opportunity to chat with the artists, including this year’s premiere artist, Daniel Josley.
Josley is a Diné artist based in Shonto on the Navajo Nation, who specializes in murals and canvas paintings. He is perhaps most well-known for his artwork depicting horned toads, which in Navajo culture represent wisdom, knowledge and protection.
Josley said he was proud to be chosen as the premiere artist for the Page Fine Art Festival, not only because of his art but also because of where he is from, who he is and what he represents.
“I really believe that as an artist, we’re all trying to get our mind and spirit out there. If this is a way to do it, then my art will speak louder than my words,” Josley told the Chronicle. “If I can climb up the ladder to spread the word about the horned toads and the stories and the relations that we have through my Navajo culture, then I will take that first step. I really appreciate the Page Fine Art Festival for choosing me to represent that.”
Art has always come naturally to Josley, who remembers doing sketches throughout his childhood and experimenting with pastels and paints in high school. He has always been interested in gathering whatever information he could about art, art history, and the use of materials like acrylic and oil paints.
However, his interest in art was put on the backburner when he left the Navajo Nation after school in pursuit of work in places like Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. He describes that period of his life as being far away from home and “in the system, another father paying his bills with a normal job.”
It wasn’t until he was working in North Dakota and got laid off that he felt compelled to get back to making art.
“One day I just picked up a pencil and paper and I sat at the kitchen table and started sketching. That sketch turned into a portrait of my grandfather, John Josley, and I kind of lost myself in what I was doing. I forgot about struggle, the bills, obligations,” he said.
“I found myself hypnotized in what I was doing and so I shared it on social media, and several months later just started paying the rent with my art. I figured, why not move home back to the motherland in Shonto and continue doing what I’m doing?”
He returned home in 2015, a move that gave him a whole different perspective on life.
“Coming home was definitely an eye-opener for me. It was like I was finally awake when I came home. I looked at everything different – my family, the canyons, the trees, the community. I wanted to make a difference,” he said.
Just how to make that difference wasn’t immediately clear. At that point, Josley was not yet painting horned toads, instead focusing on portraits, landscapes and mixed-media art as he tried to find his own style and technique through trial-and-error. He was also trying to figure out things for himself and for his family – including his wife, five kids and daughter-in-law.
It wasn’t until after Josley’s grandfather passed on that he started painting horned toads. He was raised by his grandparents, and through them found much of the wisdom, knowledge and protection that horned toads represent in his culture.
His grandfather used to tell him stories about the horned toad, which also represents family relations, as well as being a symbol of good luck.
“When I started painting my first still life image of a horned toad, it took me back to my childhood. I never really had that perspective until remembering what my grandfather used to teach me. The horned toad helped me do that, helped bring me back and give me a different perspective,” Josley said.
“In doing so, I started to create a character, which was my grandfather, and I just started to hold different childhood memory of me and the canyons and school, first experiences and travelling, as a horned toad, a grandfather horned toad. So now I do that. I travel here and there, and a lot of people can relate to what I’m doing.”
So far, Josley has completed nearly 60 murals across the Navajo Nation – in Shonto, Tuba City, Black Mesa, Kayenta and elsewhere – as well as off the reservation, in towns ranging from Page to Farmington, New Mexico.
For Josley, painting murals is “a little more addicting” than working on canvas. It can also be unpredictable, with the final image dependent not only on his imagination and skill, but also on factors like the location, the weather, the structure, whether it’s indoor or outdoor, and obstacles on the wall such as piping, windows and doors. It all contributes to the “flow” of the finished mural.
“It’s pretty interesting. Plus, at the same time there’s a lot of traffic that comes through at different times, and there’s that interaction” with the public that does not occur while working alone at home or in a studio.
Josley believes that murals can enhance public spaces, an idea that takes him back to one of his first murals in Shonto.
“When I came back home to my community here in Shonto, I just saw a lot of profanity and spraypainted graffiti on the walls, and I wanted to change that or cover it up,” he said.
“I thought maybe this was a free canvas for me to explore my ideas on. So, contributing to the community with mural art has really made a large impact on the surrounding families in the area, as far as their kids getting on the bus and driving by these murals every day. It’s inspirational, and I believe it can benefit a community for the future.”
One of his Shonto murals, titled “Horned Toad and Lightning God,” has also inspired him to start working on a children’s book – which will be published in both English and Navajo languages – about a modern-day horned toad who walks on two legs and travels to different communities telling his own story as well as older traditional tales. It’s a work in progress with no firm completion date.
“I’m not painting every day. I do things around the house, I go wood hauling, I travel at certain times to schools to give presentations and demonstrations, and to work on murals. It’s a slow project for me, but it’s something that I’m building toward,” Josley said.
He described his efforts to make a living from art and support his family as a “gamble” and an “everyday hustle,” but he’s determined to persist through the hard times – which is why he has named his personal website Persistence in Arts (www.persistenceinarts.com).
“I’ve been telling people time and time again – I think the best of us comes out when we’re going through the hard times. I’ve been down to my last 20 bucks before, and those are the times when my original artwork comes out. They’re because I need to pay the bills or I need to get food or I need to get gas money to travel,” Josley said. “So, appreciate the hard times. They’re stepping stones. That’s all the failures we have, and it’s good to embrace those. It makes you stronger.”
He also encouraged new and aspiring artists to “just get out there and do it” rather than thinking too much about making art.
“Most of my murals that I’ve done, they weren’t because I was planning things out, they were because I had an idea. As an artist, if you have a good idea, it’s hard to get that out of your head before you can move on to the next project,” he said. “So that’s what got me started in the first place. Just getting out there and doing it myself. There’s no time and day for art.”
Lynn Cormier, director of community and recreation services for the City of Page, said she was particularly excited about this year’s festival because Josley has been instrumental in invigorating more artists on the Navajo Nation to participate in the event.
She said it was extremely important to showcase local Native American artists, not only because they are neighbors to Page but also because they have their own stories to tell through their contemporary artwork.
When it comes to Native art, Cormier said, “We often think of kachina dolls and jewelry and the old pottery, but there’s some pretty contemporary and modern styles that those who have signed up for the festival have given a twist to really show their culture and how they feel they fall into today’s modern world. And I think that that voice needs to be heard. So, we’re excited to have them.”
Cormier said there will also be greater participation from local high school students this year, with as many as 50 participating in the festival.
“We’re excited to have the high school kids because it’s nice to have something that you can bring the community into,” she said, adding that as far as students go, the Best in Show event will be limited to high-school seniors. “This is something that they can build toward each year, and knowing that in senior year, if they stick with it, they can be part of the Best in Show event.”
A limited number of tickets are available for the Best in Show Art Event at Wahweap Marina on April 14. Tickets are $25 per person or $45 per couple and can be purchased at City Hall or online at events.cityofpage.org/page-fine-art-festival/.
An exhibition in Paris highlights a crucial moment in the art market’s development, when commerce and creativity became intertwined.
The gray-haired art dealer poses in a plush Parisian interior. He relaxes in an armchair, one hand on his chest, looking lost in thought.
The dealer is Paul Durand-Ruel, the leading French gallerist of the 19th century, and the portrait is by one of his best-selling artists, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Painted in 1910, it hangs in a new exhibition at La Monnaie de Paris titled “Money in Art” — an in-depth exploration of the relationship between commerce and creativity.
Durand-Ruel appears as a picture of poise and restraint compared with today’s mega-dealers, who shift big-ticket artworks in a multibillion-dollar global industry. In fact, he blazed the trail for the generations that followed: He was the first dealer to invest hugely in artists and their careers, and to turn art into a highly lucrative international business.
“Durand-Ruel was the model for the contemporary-art dealers and galleries we see today in major capitals around the world,” said Jean-Michel Bouhours, the exhibition’s curator. “He invented the paradigm.”
Bouhours, a former chief curator of modern art at the Pompidou Center, acknowledged that Durand-Ruel was generous to his artists, helping them even when they had no clients. “Yet behind this philanthropy was speculation,” he added.
The exhibition shows how money has been represented in art through some 200 objects that range from Babylonian seals and ancient Greek pottery to digital artworks made in 2022. Scholarly in scope, the show is steeped in the writings of economic theorists such as Karl Marx, whose “Das Kapital” is on display in a French-language first edition. Some of the items on display are drawn from the collection of La Monnaie, the historic headquarters of the Paris Mint, which now houses a museum and an exhibition space.
The exhibition’s essential thesis is that art and economics have always been closely intertwined, and that to understand the characteristics of art in modern times, you need to follow the money.
For a long time, artists were in the pay of the church, the crown or the state, and were commissioned to produce works on religious, mythological, or political themes. After the Industrial Revolution, when funds were needed to pay for factories, railways and mines, the state took a back seat, and capital was provided by the financial sector. Before long, it became the lifeline of the art world, too.
Suddenly, in France, speculation was everywhere: in the first casinos, where gambling was openly authorized, and at the Paris Bourse, the stock exchange, which was inaugurated in 1826. “This temple of the modern era gave rise to completely new types of behavior,” Bouhours said. “People placed bets. They took risks.”
“We’re no longer talking about a real economy, but about a financial economy, based on gambling and speculation,” he said. “Durand-Ruel was a product of this economic environment.”
A photograph taken in the 1860s shows Baron James de Rothschild, a scion of one of Europe’s leading banking families, posing with a top hat and a walking stick. Another banker, Ernest May, a collector of Edgar Degas, is painted by Degas at the Bourse. Wearing a top hat and pince-nez, he is ready to hit the trading floor as a colleague leans over to whisper in his ear.
These ultrarich financiers were soon reviled by the public, and lampooned and disparaged in caricature and literature, as the exhibition demonstrates.
A corpulent banker with a gold-encrusted hat frowns at a group of ailing and maimed figures in a caricature by Albert Hahn. The protagonist of Emile Zola’s novel “L’Argent” (“Money”) — the manuscript of which is on display — is a powerful and scheming banker who destroys lives through stock-market speculation.
In the case of Durand-Ruel, the object of speculation was art, not stocks. He borrowed heavily from banks to invest in paintings, and nearly went bankrupt in the process. What saved him in the end was a relentless international expansion effort that boosted Impressionism’s appeal and made it a big hit with wealthy American collectors.
Durand-Ruel’s business model in the 1870s was to bulk-buy Impressionist works while they were mocked and scorned by the public — and therefore very affordable. One of his descendants estimated that Durand-Ruel bought some 1,500 works by Renoir, more than 1,000 by Monet, 800 by Pissarro, more than 400 by Degas, and 200 by Manet, according to the catalog of a 2015 exhibition at the National Gallery in London titled “Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market.”
The son of an established Paris art dealer, Durand-Ruel took over his father’s gallery in 1865. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, he moved to London, met Monet and Pissarro, and decided “to take a punt on them,” said Christopher Riopelle, a co-curator of the National Gallery’s 2015 show.
Back in Paris, he also invested in Degas, Renoir and Sisley, and on a single visit to Manet’s studio bought 21 paintings, effectively controlling the artist’s nascent market.
In a stroke of marketing genius, he presented his artists not as individuals working in isolation but as members of a movement, so they would “prop up one another, but also come to be seen in the public eye as having some kind of collective weight,” Riopelle said. Presenting artists as a collective “becomes fairly standard practice from that moment on,” he said.
Durand-Ruel was, in so many ways, a pioneer of the art market as we know it. Today, major international gallerists such as Larry Gagosian maintain close personal relationships with their artists, and provide them with regular advice and financial support, Riopelle said. And artists are encouraged to develop a signature style that their biggest clients — billionaires and hedge-fund managers — will instantly recognize.
The art market “has metastasized in size and in the amount of money that moves through it,” Riopelle said. “But it’s a continuum.”
As the exhibition moves forward in time, the relationship between art and business becomes more and more entangled, and the legacy of Durand-Ruel looks increasingly complicated. Some artists embrace the overlap between art and business openly — producing lucrative series catering to wealthy collectors, and representing money in their work. Andy Warhol, for example, makes large paintings of the dollar sign, representing the world’s leading currency and the global symbol of wealth; one such painting is in the exhibition.
The overlap of art and the luxury industry is parodied in a work by the artist Sylvie Fleury, “La Mer” (2014), which is nothing more than an assortment of real-life branded shopping bags.
“Contemporary artists are now part of an industrial, globalized process in which goods are sold everywhere,” Bouhours said. “The risk is that in this ultra-commoditized world, art may end up getting a little bit lost.”
Money in Art
Through Sept. 14 at the Monnaie de Paris; monnaiedeparis.fr.
“Rocky Rise” by Dave Heilman.
Door County photographer Dave Heilman will share his talent during photography workshops set for June 3 and Sept. 23 on Plum Island and hosted by Friends of Pilot and Plum Islands. Heilman has explored photography as a part-time hobby, a full-time profession and now an outlet for his passion for landscapes and nature.
All types of photographers are welcome, and no experience is necessary. Proceeds from this workshop (the cost is $35 per person) will go toward historical preservation of the maritime structures on Plum and Pilot Islands.
Find details about registration and cancellation at plumandpilot.org.
