Bio: Chip Forelli's photographic objective is to acknowledge and celebrate the existence of beauty - he often finds it in unexpected or overlooked places and circumstances. He refers to these encounters as "Visual Gifts" and in turn offers them to us in the form of a fine photographic print for our own reflection. Like a Zen garden, composed of a few uncluttered objects, each of Forelli's images invite the viewer to imagine himself in the landscape. "My goal is to suggest an emotional response to the viewer and leave enough room for interpretation. I like the images to provoke a second look with some questions not immediately answered." The essence of his approach is a delicate balance of aesthetic and technical controls, this being the foundation of the workshops he conducts.

For him, color can often be a distraction. "The use of black and white heightens the graphic content and takes the experience to another level, where the image rendered purely in terms of form and tone is more of an abstraction with added dimension and depth".

Photographs:A Hasselblad camera for 120 film or Linhof Technika 2000 for 4x5 film is used with T-Max and Tri-X film. Special development procedures for high contrast (night photography) situations are used. Black and white selenium toned gelatin silver prints are produced by the photographer in the traditional darkroom. Negatives that are extremely difficult to print or mechanically flawed are scanned at ultra-high resolution. Techniques that emulate regular darkroom techniques to darken, lighten or vary contrast are employed digitally and a negative is output from the final digital file. The new master negative is then printed conventionally onto silver halide paper in the wet darkroom.