Artist Bio

“My philosophy about photography, in general, is that it doesn’t matter which camera or technique you apply to your images. The image must say something compelling and hopefully something unique.”

 My very first camera was a Kodak Duaflex box camera given to me by my parents when I was eleven. The film was 620 roll film in black-and-white only. From that very beginning, I knew the camera was able to capture more than “reality”, and it allowed me to share my reality. 

My first serious camera was a used Leica M3, produced in 1954, and purchased in 1973 along with a few old, but very sharp, used Leica lenses. As my skills improved, I started shooting weddings in Minneapolis, MN and acquired a basic wet darkroom.  It was during college that I first took a couple of courses on photographic techniques.

I then began my college studies in earnest, graduating from U of M medical school in 1984 and pursuing a family practice residency in Fargo, ND.  With a new marriage and medical practice in the Bemidji community, my photography took a necessary back seat until 1999 when I returned to my love affair with photography in a serious way. 

This period was the advent of the new electronic cameras and advanced computer programs that became known as the “Electronic Darkroom”. Initially, I wanted none of that.  And because professional photographers were unloading their expensive equipment on eBay at ridiculously low prices, I quickly acquired a great wet darkroom and a couple of 4×5 view cameras and lenses. I started to make what I thought were pretty good gelatin silver prints in fairly large format images. 

What I soon realized was that master black-and-white printers needed a minimum of 25 years of full-time work to produce the most compelling images, and those pursuing electronic digitally-altered images were getting amazing results almost right away.  Of course, this was a bit flabbergasting.

And so, it wasn’t long before I made two trips to work one-on-one with Dan Burkholder, author of, “Making Digital Negatives for Contact Printing”. 

The digital files could then be worked in the similar wet darkroom fashion as Ansel Adams did, but by computer tools that could be learned in a fraction of the time necessary to achieve amazing results.  Now, at this time, the iPhone has almost rendered “professional cameras”, obsolete.

I am grateful to have seen all these changes in my lifetime, and I continue to really enjoy sharing my view of “imagery reality” with others.

William M. Petersen