Larey McDaniel got his first clarinet
and his first camera at about the same time. His music
studies began in the fourth grade at his Bremerton
elementary school. The following year, he inaugurated
his new Kodak Brownie camera on a family trip to Glacier
National Park. He’s been enthralled with both art forms
ever since, and created a professional life that neatly
intertwines the two.
Larey’s photography
endeavors hit an unprecedented high note this autumn
with the publication of his first book: a coffee-table
volume of photos taken on a raft trip down the Grand
Canyon in May. The View from Below: A Photographic Essay
is a dramatic mixture of full-color and black-and-white
shots taken with a Fuji S2 digital SLR camera and
processed by Larey in Adobe Photoshop and Qimage Pro.
He has been taking photos professionally since his
college years: as a student at the Oberlin Conservatory
of Music, he served as the photographer for touring
music groups.
Larey cites the rapid evolution of digital cameras and
image-enhancing software as the factor that has most
fueled his passion for photography. “It became much more
interesting when the technology allowed me to do it all
myself – and to control what appears on a print,” he
says. “I never liked being in a darkroom. It’s so, well,
dark.”
“Interesting” for Larey includes
the rather remarkable manipulation of images. Some of
the photos he shows at the Parklane Gallery in Kirkland,
where he has been an exhibitor for the past five years,
are the result of what he calls “stitching together”
multiple images of the same landscape scene.
The process, he says, provides the resulting photograph
with many additional pixels of information, allowing for
much greater depth of field and capturing scenes that
more closely mimic all the detail that can be absorbed
by the human eye.
