Mark Dornfeld

Bio..... Photography has played an important role in my life both on a professional level and in my personal life. After my graduation from Cal Arts my entire professional life has been spent working in the Film Industry. Starting out as an artisan working in the Visual Effects field, a purely photochemical endeavor at that time, to becoming a Visual Effects Supervisor. After 8 years at Disney studios I moved on to owning and operating a small Visual Effects company here in Los Angeles. Custom Film Effects operated for 16 years throughout the transition from photochemical imaging to digital imaging. Both processes having advantages and disadvantages, the studio functioned in both worlds. After 36 years of frenetic deadlines and the long hours of the film industry, it has become time to move on and get back to some of my own work. I am presently involved with both archiving some of the over 70,000 photos in my collection and producing new images. Many of the images I am presently building are composites and not strictly photographs by the normal definition. The digital media available to photographers today has broken us out of the darkrooms and the unknown results involved with shooting latent images. Now we can preview and adjust in the field and bring our images into a processing space where they can be re-envisioned and rediscovered. Photographers have been freed.