Welcome to this edition. The days are few and the excitement is high as the inaugrual Pixiport Expo,"Photography: Art In Focus" opens this Friday evening at the Gold Leaf Gallery in Deland, Florida.

Final details are falling into position and many of the artists have started to arrive. Nine of the sixteen artists featured are scheduled to be present for the opening.

One yet unannounced addition to the Expo is the silent auction which will take place opening night. Seven of the participating artists have each donated one of their works to this auction. 50% of the auction proceeds will be donated to the Photography section of the Arts Department at Deland High School in Pixiport's ongoing effort to not only promote the arts but offer educational opportunity as well. "Hopefully these funds will assist aspiring photo-artists in furthering their endeavors", stated Helyn Davenport, the creator of Pixiport and the Expo.

Making a multi-layered image, using photos, painting and Blending Modes.

You can build up a picture from as many layers as you want - as many as your computer's memory can cope with! This picture, which will have over 30 layers of photographs and painting, will have the appearance and atmosphere of a Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painting, using present day photographs.

2. Make a loose selection of a figure, using the Lasso Tool and super-impose, as a layer, on to the background. In the Layers Palette, select Normal blending mode. When making very loose selections, it is easy to clean up the edges by going to Layers, Add Layer Mask. Reveal All. Now take the paintbrush, and paint around the edges of your selection, which you will see disappearing. If you paint out too much, you can use the keyboard command "X" and paint the edges back in again. Toggle "X" and paint more background and so on. Thus, using also a bit of magnification, it is easy to get a perfect selection.

3. You can make a background sky by cloning across from another photograph of a better-defined sky on to a new layer and erasing the edges to fit the background. You also may have to Edit,Transform, Scale the new sky to fit the picture.

Find out more....

	Ricardo Báez Duarte
This exhibit is basically a reflection focused on Solitude considered as an intense and concentrated experience of inner self, in a few words, pure unpolluted ego. From this point of view, everything, detected in nature, humanity, and artifacts is worth of pondering and respect. I was influenced by Proust's idea as revealed on "Remembrance of Things Past" that reality is perceived only through memories systematically analyzed. I constructed virtual memories from the data caught by my camera and my photographic insight , reprocessed in the computer ,and created an specific mood suited to the expression of my deepest feelings with the aid of excerpts by Schubert and Schuman. Mathematics Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas. Licenciate in Mathematics 1976. University of California at San Diego. M.A in Mathematics,1978. Arts Music: Piano (classic); Harmony and Jazz improvisation Visual Arts Workshop, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas. Escuela Cristóbal Rojas Computerized Stained Glass Design. Visit Gallery.... »

	Pedro Dinis
I started giving my first steps in photography when I was ten years old, first with black and white and later on with color. I am not sure what a kind of photography I do, maybe I´ll never know because I like to experience several styles. Only the love that I have for photography can take me to have new experiences in lots of ways, finding a little bit more about my self, and surprise me constantly. I´m an eternal amateur in this fascinating world. . I participate and participe in some individual and colective expositions.Some of my works found themself published in newspapers, magazines and yearbooks, and also commercial work. I´ve had photography as a profession, but now days I do it for my own pleasure, without limits or obligations. Photography, for me, besides all adjectives that it might have, it´s a support to my life memory. I let myself go with my own feelings and the state of mind of the moment... Visit Gallery... »

	Michael Colin Campbell
Michael Colin Campbell is an international award-winning photographer and digital artist whose work is exhibited and sold in galleries in England and America. He started his photographic career, after leaving a 500 year old boys school in England, as a research scientist at the Kodak research lab in London, where he worked on photographic color reproduction. After a year, he left to attend university and pursue his love for the sciences. Michael studied physics, geology, zoology and astrophysics, and eventually completed his thesis for a masters degree in geology by studying the oldest rock formations in Britain on the island of Iona in the Hebrides of Scotland. Despite his training in science his hobbies and interests were mainly in the Arts and sport. It was the fact that he was competing regularly for Britain in the international track and field team that kept him from leaving England to become a geologist, as he graduated just prior to the Mexico Olympic games, so he returned to Kodak, where for four years he taught photographic technology to students from all over the world at the Kodak Photographic School. In the 70s he left Kodak to teach documentary film production at the college in Salisbury. Shortly after his move to Wiltshire, he bought a 200 year old abandoned school house from the landowner and ex-prime minister Sir Anthony Eden, Sir Anthony needed a portrait for a book cover and became Michael's first commercial portrait client. Michael rebuilt the school house and designed and made all the furniture and landscaped the garden himself. While teaching he worked part time as a freelance documentary film cameraman and sound recordist for the BBC. His hobbies were painting and landscape photography and in 1979 he decided to take a sabbatical and write articles on the photography of Paul Caponigro and Ansel Adams in the USA. He decided to stay a while in California and became a professor at Cal Poly State University for several years. He bought his first Macintosh in 1984 and became interested in the possibility of using it with photography. He has been specializing in portraiture in his own business in San Diego, where he lives with his ten year old son Alex . but Michael is now publishing and selling limited editions of digital photographic work ranging from black and white landscapes to still life and figurative work. Visit Gallery... »

	Tony Lane
Born in 1960, I started my working life as an engineer. During this time I formed a rock band and began a venture into the world of entertainment. Although ultimately my song writing was not a commercial success, it did enable me to build up a network of contacts. After first running an entertainment agency, the contacts I made enabled me to be the first person in the UK to start a Product Placement company, specifically dealing with terrestrial television companies. It was fascinating seeing first hand the behind the scenes filming. Seeing the professionals in action bolstered my keen interest in photography. It was during this period that I became a freelance photographer, undertaking diverse assignments from models' portfolios, commercial shoots and weddings to car sport, both in Britain and eventually Holland. But the early nineties was a particularly turbulent period for me. After losing both parents and getting a divorce, I took a completely different path in life. Eventually graduating as a psychiatric nurse and specialising in forensic psychiatry, gave me a completely new perspective on how one views the world. After meeting my present wife, with her love and guidance I began learning shamanic healing. The world as I knew it changed. It would never be the same again. Delving into the light and the dark depths of humanity, and actually journeying in other realities, taught me that there is 'more than one way to skin a cat'. Ten people can witness a crash and tell ten different tales of how it happened and what they saw. But each person will believe what they witnessed was real This is how I view the world through my camera. Each initial image is only an impression of a real moment. But, through digital manipulation, I can change that moment. Using my imagination as a tool to create a new impression, the final image may not resemble that first impression, but isn't that how life sometimes reflects upon us? Visit Gallery... »

	The Voice Behind The Lens
Michael Dubiner THE ETHOS OF THE STREET PHOTOGRAPHER Or the Virtue of the "Morally Neutral" Street Photograph Historically, Street Photographers have been thought of as having an ethos, or guiding belief, which closely aligned them with the circumstances of the subjects of their images. This belief likely stems from the extraordinary images of several early and influential Street Photographers who's social viewpoint was inexorably intertwined with their photographs. Images reflecting concerns over social inequality, racism, other social ills and the tragedy of the Great Depression fused their way into the American psyche as the primary product of the Street Photographer. However, the notion that the Street Photographer must have such an ethos or sentiment, tying the image maker to the plight of his or her subjects in order to make significant images is not only a myth, it is an anti- creative one. If such an ethos is required, our work by definition is limited to subjects that we can connect to. If we happen to be less connected, we necessarily will make less meaningful images. And, if unfortunately unconnected, we can make none. Image making beyond this myth frees the Street Photographer to make important images of what would otherwise be the mundane. Released from the need to express a point of view or, for that matter, to make politically correct photographs, the photographer can make "morally neutral" images reflecting what they see around them. This opens the vast and under explored world of everyday life to the Street Photographer making the millions of potential images we see each day available to us as subjects. The idea is not to make mundane images, it is to capture what is meaningful or stimulating in the everyday and to suffuse them with life. Of course, this reasoning in no way negates the creation and importance of images reflecting the ethos of the photographer. There will always be the need for images makers to expose what they see and believe. In fact, I am certain that most of us share this belief and it is part of the reason we view and make Street Photographs. I only advocate freedom from the requirement of always expressing our sentiments in our image making. This allows us to explore the captivating in the daily circumstances of our lives, no matter where we live or who we encounter. An icon reflecting the despair of the Great Depression is Dorothea Lange's MIGRANT MOTHER. (Each photographer mentioned in this article along with sites exhibiting some of their work on the internet are listed at the end of this article.) The photograph represented to the American public the terrible tragedy of the Great Depression through one family's plight and was one of many such images in a great body of her work on the subject. The image depicts a mother in a lean-to tent, in obvious despair looking out into a hostile and neglectful world. Two of her children are facing away from the camera taking comfort from their mother, while a baby, barely visible is in her arms. Continue on.... »

	Art of Internet Photography
Ken Windsor The Photographer BACIAR presents nudes, but these are very special nudes, and I reckon you will not have seen anything like this before. In a biography on his site, Anna Moran says " The human beings portrayed on the photographs are more like bronze statues or stone sculptures than actual people, giving the photography a further abstraction and meaning to the ideas represented by the artist" The images are certainly an acquired taste, but are wonderfully different, and I love the "glow" they exude. http://ww w.baciar.com/Apolonia.html To view the series, just use the back and forward buttons on his page. There are just some images that have universal appeal. I am sure that if JULIA BECKER-BENDER were to market this image it would sell a million times over, because it has that special something which is timeless and precious. http: //home.arcor.de/orchidan/Pix/001.html Told you didn't I !!!!!! Although this next image is small, it has that special something worthy of a mention on this page. ROBERT BROWN has produced a simple but very effective silhouette which just shouts the word "atmosphere" at you. http://www.brown- photo.com/12.htm I fell in love with these eyes ! http://ww w.jimbrey.com/Image3p.html JAMES G BREY takes good portraits, and again the eyes http://ww w.jimbrey.com/Image5p.html have it. I have featured the work of STEVEN J BROWN on a previous site, and I can now introduce him to all PixiPort readers. His images of trains and railroads are something very special. What I like about his imagery is that it not only shows the trains, but also portrays the countryside in such a vivid and atmospheric way. As a taster take a look at these. The Art Of Internet Photography...... »

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