Member of the Month

Originally from Maine, Michael Girard currently lives in the Dallas area. He retired from the US Navy after 24 years of service and continues to serve in a defense contractor role supporting the Navy. He always enjoyed photography but only seriously pursued it as a hobby beginning in 2014. Michael enjoys exploring abandoned places and photographing them after dark. He likes the relaxed feeling of waiting three or four minutes to capture one image and the peaceful surroundings these places usually offer. He also enjoys shooting landscapes and city lights.

How do you support your photography habit?
Retired from the Navy, I have a military pension and currently work full-time in the defense industry.

When did you start taking pictures?
I’ve always liked taking pictures but never realized that there were “rules” involved. A Navy photographer taught me the rule of thirds in the late 90’s, and that was the only rule I was aware of until another friend taught me the exposure triangle and how to use my Nikon D3100 in manual mode in 2011. I took my first class with DCP (then Spot Studio) in 2014. That was when I really started taking it seriously.

What was your first camera? Current camera?
I’ve had multiple cameras over the years, but I started taking it more seriously when I got my Nikon D3100. I upgraded to the D7100 shortly after which I still use today. I still want to make one more upgrade, but I’ll wait until I know for sure because that should be my last camera.

Have you ever made money from your photos? Is it something you plan to continue?
I’ve sold a few prints here and there, mostly to friends at work. I had planned to attend a couple of art fairs this year to check out how photographers sell their prints with plans to try that out next year. Eventually I plan to build a website but not for a couple more years. I may also start contributing to a stock site.

What motivates you to pick up your camera? How do you feel when you’re shooting?
Now that I have a few years of practice, I’m usually able to capture what I intended to capture. But every once in a while, I’ll get an image that seems to look better than the scene I was shooting. It’s hard to describe but I look forward to those magical captures even though they don’t happen too often.

View more of Michael’s work on Instagram.

: Multistrobe Futuro – With multiple exposures and some help from photoshop, I achieved the desired result of each window being lit a different color.

: Red Wood – Recipe for this image: A dead tree in Lake Ray Hubbard, a red colored flashlight, a bright moon, an aircraft in the holding pattern, and let it set about three minutes.

: Forgotten Fill-Ups – A long abandoned chalet-style gas station along Route 66 in Texola, Oklahoma on the Texas / Oklahoma border.

: Contrabando Adobe Noche – This adobe structure is the only one remaining from the Contrabando movie set along the Rio Grande in Big Bend Ranch State Park.

: Dallas Pyramids – Walking from one planned composition to the next while taking some night shots in downtown Dallas, I looked to my left and saw this. It turned out to be my best shot of the night!

: Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge – This is another unplanned shot that I took walking back to my truck after completing a planned shot of this bridge from further along the levee.

: Special Delivery – I don’t know this van’s story but I bet it’s a good one. It is abandoned near the Chinati Mountains not far from the Mexican border.

: Rock House – The clouds make this shot. Ironically these same clouds kept the moon mostly hidden making me work hard to get the scene lit with a flashlight.

: Last Lap – A young go-kart racer comes into turn three with a nice sunset in the background.

: Truck Stop – The best sunsets I’ve seen are in west Texas. Sometimes it seems the entire sky is lit orange. This sunset is framed by the canopy of a long abandoned truck stop.

Connie Carr is based in Dallas and travels frequently in her role as a national account manager for an Italian company. She enjoys the hectic travel aspect of her career, feeling lucky to visit so many places and enjoy local culture. To balance that busy schedule, Connie appreciates spending quiet, meditative time in nature for photography. By observing the lines, structure, and rhythm in nature and adding artistic camera techniques, she hopes to capture a little bit of nature’s magic in her fine art images.

If you aren’t a full-time professional photographer, how do you support your photography habit?
My job allows me a great deal of flexibility to enjoy photography. Even though my photography work is “part time”, it is growing into a full-time profession.

When did you start taking pictures?
Technically, I was four years old. My first photo, which I still have, was of white ducks and a bridge. My mom thought I was wasting film. I remember thinking I was creating a masterpiece! The more real answer is 17, when I was editor of the high school yearbook. I wasn’t a fan of the photos that had been submitted for consideration, so I borrowed the principal’s 35mm camera. I had no idea what I was doing, so he taped the wheels and buttons of the camera in place and told me not to move them. It worked! I got my shots!

What was your first camera? Current camera?
Kodak Instamatic? First “real” camera was a Canon AE1. My current systems are Nikon and Fuji.

Have you ever made money from your photos? If so, is it something you plan to continue?
Yes, I have done dance, sports, portrait, product and lifestyle shoots for many clients. My focus going forward is very different. I’m focused on nature photography with final images intended for print, either for a wall or to be included in a photo book.

What motivates you to pick up your camera? How do you feel when you’re shooting?
I actually stopped shooting two years ago. Most of my work at that time was product and lifestyle photography for corporate clients and it wasn’t fun for me anymore. It was probably more about burnout, but I needed a break so I stopped. A year into that pause, I very randomly decided to join a group of photographers on a trip to the Palouse area of Washington state during the harvest season. I had never shot landscapes before and I really don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to go on that trip. But I went and was awestruck with the jaw dropping scenery in that area of the country. The calmness, serenity and enjoyment of photography returned to me during that trip. Fast forward to today and I continue to focus on nature photography.

View more of Connie’s work on her website or Instagram.

: I shot this in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and it will always be one of my favorite images, because I love sitting on a beach, watching and listening to the waves. Also, because this is the first image that I ever entered into a photography competition. It placed third in its category, out of more than seventy entries. I was thrilled!

: This image was made during my trip to the Palouse area of Washington state in the midst of fall harvest season. Standing on a small country road, we were completely surrounded by rolling wheat fields and fluffy cherub clouds. The lone grouping of trees is the only thing that broke the line the sight line for miles.

: The view from the vantage point of Steptoe Butte State Park near Colfax, Washington is one not to be missed. The colors of the rolling fields of farmland seemed to shift and change in the light. At dusk, I was very excited to capture that last kiss of sunset as it cast highlights across the tops of the mounds.

: Caddo Lake is a magical, near mythical, natural lake and bayou in east Texas. The shallow lake has hundreds, if not thousands, of giant cypress trees covered in Spanish moss both along the shore and in the water swamps. Wanting to capture the trees’ reflections in the water, so I was there at sunrise, hoping for few boaters and still waters. I got my wish with a lake surface that looked like glass.

: The wind was blowing while I was trying to shoot my neighbor’s bird of paradise plant. Rather than giving up on getting a perfectly in-focus shot, I decided to embrace the plant’s movement and try an abstract look. The movement gave the image an overall softness that I think works well in this abstract look.

: I’ve tried to become more observant of lines, structure, and colors of nature. My neighbor’s plants offered great examples of those qualities.

: This shot is of a small section of a large coleus shrub. It’s one of those plants that you can easily walk past and not really notice the details of the leaves, but once you do notice, you don’t forget. The leaves seem to dance around one another and create a lovely natural rhythm.

: Lagniappe is that little something extra and that’s exactly what I got with the little green frog. During the early morning hours and under the shadow of several trees, the water garden was very dark. So dark, I didn’t immediately notice the frog! I’m very grateful he was there and that he remained quite still for several minutes.

: At first glance, this may look like a typical water lily floating on water. It’s actually an American lotus and the stem reaches about three feet above the water. The telephoto lens compressed the background leaf to appear a bit closer than it actually was, but it works nicely as a background for the blossom.

: I enjoy macro flower photography, but I couldn’t get quite that close to this lotus since it was several feet into the pond. Using a telephoto lens and then cropping a bit, I got this detail image of a lotus petal.

: I was mesmerized with the many layers and details in this water garden. Where to focus? The flower, the buds, the oversized leaves? When the wind blew, the large leaves would rise and fall, the flowers would sway, and the scene would constantly change. I stayed two hours photographing and simply enjoying this special place.

: I used different techniques to capture this abstract image of a koi pond. I combined a slow shutter speed with a small intentional camera movement while the fish swam around. It took several attempts and each image was certainly different. This one has three different koi swimming through the frame.

Born in Saskatchewan, raised in North Dakota and Montana. I started messing around with photography early on, shooting black and white film with a Kodak Instamatic and learning to process my own film in the bathroom, which in turn I converted into a makeshift darkroom. When I was about 14 my older brother who was in the service during the Vietnam war finished up his tour of duty and decided to take a trip to Europe for several months. He shipped all his belongings home and spent the next several months abroad. All his stuff was stored in the basement of our house and I just started digging through boxes where I found two 35mm cameras, a Walz Envoy 35 which was a knockoff of a Leica Rangefinder and a Minolta SRT 101 single lens reflex. I appropriated both, and was on my way to a career in photography.

I attended Montana State University and received a degree in Film and Television. While going to school, I was photo-editor of both the Yearbook and the newspaper, and worked summers for a portrait studio and held a second job as a Ranger for the Forest Service. At the ripe old age of 21, I started my first photo studio with a close friend and we began shooting advertising work for DANA Corp, Sharp’s Firearms and Big Sky Ski Resorts to name a few. The major bonus of this was never having to pay to ski (Awesome)!

In 1980, I moved to Dallas and began working at a large commercial photo studio, where I shot annual reports, catalogs and advertising for a varied clientele. After a few years working as a shooter, I moved on to running the studio portion of the business as well as shooting. In 1985, I started Anderson Studio and have had three different studio locations over the years. Currently, I specialize in people, fashion and oddly enough, motorsports. To those who know me and my penchant for Hotrods, not too surprising.

In 2005, I purchased a building and built a 5000 sq. ft. live work studio situation that has drive-in access for shooting cars and other large sets. Currently married to professional make-up artist, Paige Anderson, we shoot together when we can and we sometimes still speak to each other. Check it out at www.andersonstudio.com.

: The Miller Light Dragster leaves the starting line in the finals of the 2001 US Nationals. Larry Dixon was the driver and won the race, the biggest drag race of the year. One of those pictures where the light and everything came together.

: The driver at the top of the photograph is Eric Medlin and his team before a race. Eric was killed in a racing accident in 2007. Great driver and person, as well as a friend.