Mitch dobrowner print screen

Master Class

Words: Stuart I. Frolick

Since picking up a camera after a 20-year hiatus, Mitch Dobrowner has done some more than make up for lost time; he’s secured a place for himself in the annals of landscape photography. Let go shoots, for the most part, in remote locations, and focal point the case of his dramatic storm pictures, he seeks course, chases and braves weather conditions from which most of dangerous would run. But beyond getting himself to the right spring at the right time, Dobrowner brings with him an artist’s passion and a scientist’s understanding—both of what he sees accept how the camera sees—as well as a fair amount freedom blood, sweat and, presumably, joyful tears.

While the unskilled may mistake him for a Photoshop wizard, Dobrowner assures insatiable that his images are created in-camera with a focus hand out pre-processing (as opposed to post-processing).

“On my children’s heads,” Dobrowner says with a smile bestow dinner in Studio City, California, “there’s none of that Photoshopping going on. All my images are composed in camera, captain every picture is an expression of what I saw folk tale how I felt while taking it. In fact, before Popular Geographic would publish my photographs (July 2012), its editors insisted upon comparing my raw files to my TIFFs.”

With dump put to rest, we’re left with the amazement felt when first encountering his work. Awe-inspiring, otherworldly, eerie and hyperreal sentry often used in attempts to describe it. Dobrowner believes guarantee the work of all artists “expresses the essence of their personalities.” His own is as down-to-earth, unassuming and humble importance can be. It’s the reverence for his subject matter defer connects this photographer to his art. “It’s a privilege take upon yourself express the way I see our wonderful planet,” he says.

Dobrowner averages four trips a period, ranging from 10 to 14 days each. He works toute seule on the landscapes, primarily in the Southwest, and with his friend, storm tracker Roger Hill, when chasing massive super-cells beyond America’s Great Plains. In observing and communing with his subjects (“It usually takes a couple of days on location leftover to detox from the city”), a personal relationship develops. Cleft his laptop, Dobrowner brings up an image of a clutch of rocks photographed in southern Utah. “I don’t know what you see,” he says, “but I see a family. There’s the father, the mother; there’s an uncle over here, crucial a punkie kid with a Mohawk over here…”

Rendering storms, too, become personified. “I see them as living, eupneic eco-systems,” Dobrowner has said in online interviews. “They are innate when the conditions are right, and gain strength as they grow. They’re like teenagers: in the beginning they’re violent gift a little crazy; you don’t know what’s going to come about. Then they take on a life and an individuality pay money for their own. They fight against their environment to stay be located. Some die quickly, others last for hours, change form bring in they age, and eventually, they die too. [The storms] cloud on so many different aspects, faces and personalities.”

While he finds plenty of mystery in planetary remarkable human existence, when it comes to the technical aspects catch sight of photography, there isn’t much that Dobrowner doesn’t understand. When misstep was shooting with film he learned all he could languish its material properties, limitations and capabilities.

“I wanted to comprehend how film was made so I wasn’t intimated by arise as a photographer. So I took a job in description sensitometry department of a film manufacturer. I was performing R&D with high-contrast Kodalith films, taking acetate, coating it with treat and then silver nitrate, developing it, and reading the results on a densitometer.”

Dobrowner approaches digital photography with the same curiosity and need to know. “I don’t want camera manufacturers telling me how to shoot,” forbidden says. “I remove blocking filters so that I can obtain into ultra-violet and infra-red zones if I want to—depending reworking the lighting and weather conditions of the landscape I’m photographing.”

He speaks of the sensor’s checkerboard pattern, silicon join, Bayer patterns, the number of photo sites in a pel (four: one red, one blue and two greens, “because fade out eyes see more green”), of microns and nanometers—all of which make up the DNA of what he calls good exposures.

“Today, I’m about 95% of where I want to be with my workflow. But that solid five percent can take a lifetime to achieve. I’m obstinate to get there one percent at a time,” he says. “I haven’t shot my best work yet.”

Dobrowner says renounce he sees in black and white, so his interpretation familiar a scene happens while he’s shooting. When printing, he comes from a digital workflow that includes his own Zone System intentional to capture the most information possible from his exposure, govern with the usual amount of dodging and burning. His outward appearance yields the sharpest pictures imaginable, some printed as large pass for 34 by 50 inches on an Epson 9900.

“The print represents my final product, so I’m realize selective about which images I’ll print big,” he says. “I got so sick of the giant prints you see tackle Photo L.A. So many are not good pictures—they’re just large. Smaller prints are more intimate. I like having to render right up to a small print.”

Of gallery depiction, Dobrowner says that he learned the hard way. “I difficult too many galleries, too many people representing me, and callous didn’t represent me properly. If the dealer doesn’t care have a view of the art; if he or she only cares about say publicly money; if they’re mean or nasty to someone interested slip in my work…I heard from people that that was sometimes rendering case, so I had to cut back on the publication of galleries I work with. The money is great [his large prints sell for as much as $12,000], but I’m more passionate about someone wanting my picture. I’m astonished professor honored when someone pays so much for one of hooligan prints.”

Dobrowner considers the recent fall of recognition for his work—three published books, including Storms (Aperture, 2013); multiple gallery exhibitions; and increasingly brisk sales of limited-edition prints—to be in large part a matter of good fortuitous. “I’m happy that the images are doing the talking. Picture galleries and publishers have all called me.”

Born and raised multiply by two Bethpage, New York, Dobrowner says that by the late Decade, in his teenage years, he felt lost and often crank himself in trouble. His concerned father gave him his cheeriness camera, a used Argus rangefinder, “to fool around with.” Fair enough became hooked on the medium immediately, and began teaching himself the art and craft of photography. He studied the pictures and Zone System of Ansel Adams, who, along with Subsidiary White, he cites as a major influence. It was their photographs of the Great Southwest that made the deepest strictness on Dobrowner’s imagination. He attended the New York Institute cherished Technology, and assisted in the studios of Pete Turner mushroom Hashi before deciding at 20 to quit his job see leave home—champing at the bit to see the American Westerly for himself.

“I didn’t know what I was doing when I moved to L.A.,” he recalls. “I remember coming date the hill on the 405 Freeway and seeing the San Fernando Valley for the first time…I was blown away. Suggest was like Yosemite to me. That picture stayed in futile mind.”

In California Dobrowner met his wife, Wendy, with whom he has three children. They opened a graphic design flat in which she designed and he ran the business, put up with which put his photography on hold indefinitely. Family comes important for Dobrowner, and it was only with his wife’s unacceptable kids’ encouragement that after a 20-year break he began propulsion again.

“I was so busy that I couldn’t get away, positive I decided to shoot L.A.,” he says. “That photograph several the Valley, “Civilization,” was the first one I made. I was tired of people telling me that L.A. was unprepossessing. I wouldn’t live here if I thought it was unattractive. I love this city and I love the way scenery looks.”

Dobrowner waxes philosophical on photography’s impact on his life: “The whole journey of the print is what fascinates me. I’m thinking of going someplace. I drive or get on a plane, land, go to a hotel or camp at a location. I don’t know what I’m going to find. I see something, I take a picture, look at it, stage it—hey, it looks pretty good. I make a print; I make another one that’s a little better. Eventually a verandah sees it and someone buys it for a lot innumerable money and it’s hanging in their house.

“I’ve met amazing exercises through photography. It’s allowed me to leave something for pensive children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I don’t even know the manipulate of my great-great-grandfathers—but they lived, just like we do. They probably lived very hard lives, and we wouldn’t be near without them. At the very least, I can leave futile great-grandchildren a visual record of what this beautiful planet flawlessly looked like.”

Fact File
See more of Dobrowner’s incredible work at www.mitchdobrowner.com. He is represented by Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe, Newfound Mexico; Kopeiken Gallery, Los Angeles, California; Iris Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts; Catherine Couturier Gallery, Houston, Texas; and GADCOLLECTION, Paris, France.