Jim Sabiston
Essential Light Photography
My photography is the result of my great love of both the outdoors and the arts. I am an avid outdoorsman and enjoy kayaking, canoeing, backpacking, hiking, winter mountaineering and just plain old exploring.
I have had a life-long interest in the arts, especially the visual arts, and even made a small living in the mid ‘70’s selling my watercolors and painting custom vans and motorcycles. The transition to photography was a quick and natural one with the advent of digital photography , which made the medium practical for me. The self-contained, portable nature of the technology in the field and the ability to process the images immediately upon returning to my studio while the memories are still fresh has proven invaluable. Blending the technical aspects of photography and digital camera technology with my painting background proved to be the perfect medium. The result is Essential Light Photography.
While Landscape and Nature photography planted the seed and is still my first love, my interests have expanded to include those places where man’s presence blends with nature, such as parks and gardens and most recently entirely man-made places such as New York City. The goal remains the same regardless of the subject, to bring you, the viewer, to a visual and emotional place you might otherwise never know even if you walk by the subject every day.
One of the things that I soon discovered, regardless of the specific subject, is how most people live through their lives without actually ‘seeing’ the world around them. Most of us never see past the surface of a thing or place, and register even very little of that. Such is the nature of our busy, modern lives. This sad reality is only worsened by the constant onslaught of ever present media constantly vying for our attention. It is one of the photographers chosen tasks to break through this shell and draw the viewer deeper into a place or closer to a particular object or into a specific moment. A successful connection with the viewer will always evoke an emotional response to the image. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes uncomfortable, but a connection must be made. This is the sole hallmark of the successful image. All else is secondary.
To this end I constantly experiment with new subjects and techniques, always pushing the boundries of what a camera can accomplish. I have no formal training in photography. Rather, I approach the camera as a tool and a vehicle to be bent to a purpose, to create an original vision of the world we live in.
