About Floris: artist statement

Each of my images is the result of patient hours spent in the field, exploring, learning, feeling, and seeing. Occasionally everything aligns and I get to bring home meaningful images, but I enjoy every minute of the wilderness regardless of my photographic success. Currently, my equipment of choice is a Canon digital SLR, a wide array of Canon lenses, and Singh-Ray & BreakThrough filters. This is an exciting time in photography, and I fully embrace the power of the digital darkroom to turn the raw camera data into works of art that have the emotional impact of a painting, but with the detail, authenticity, and direct connection to nature that comes with photography. It is very important to me that my images are photographs, and not paintings, as it means that they are in fact real events that I experienced in real places. You could go out and see these places for yourself, in fact, I hope my images inspire you to do just that.

The brain is a wonderful piece of machinery; a complex network of close to 100 billion neurons, and of those almost 300 million are involved in visual processing. What this means is, what you "see", is not in fact, "reality" as it is. If you need convincing, take a look at some of these optical illusions. Thus, it should be no surprise to you that using a camera to produce an image that looks similar to what we experience is not trivial. In fact, in many cases a significant amount of post processing of photographs is required to render the scene as it was experienced in person. So, while I do my best to capture my photographs in traditional single exposures where possible, often times I will make use of multiple exposures of the same scene to blend together for increased control of tonal range, image quality, and subject motion. In every case I strive to make my art honest to the original scene, with modest contrast and saturation adjustments for aesthetic considerations; I never add or remove significant elements. If you are interested in learning more about my methods, I invite you to read my articles and peruse my blog. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.