Melinda

I have always been captivated by the portrait. Growing up near Yosemite, my friends would have their cameras pointed at the waterfalls and I would be scanning the crowd looking for an interesting face. In college I was busy painting photo-realism portraits. One day my professor said,"Melinda, you try so hard to make your paintings look like photographs, why don't you just take a photograph?" This question set me on a path of photographic study with my mentor, Steve Dzerigian. Although I was passionate about photography, I never made it my job, instead I opened a corporate Travel Agency and later a Yoga Studio with my husband. In fact, photographing the yoga students is what has inspired me to return to my first love, photographing faces. Big, soulful, beautiful faces. Armed with state of the art digital camera gear, creative software like Photoshop CS4, Adobe Lightroom and Dreamweaver, I'm falling in love all over again.

What else do I love? Family. Friends. Yoga. The mountains, Cape Cod. Hammocks. The way light spills onto and through things. Strong coffee. Birds. My backyard and the morning doves that have lived there as long as I have. Color, mostly greens. Italy and France. Staying up late. Breezes. History. Stories, movies and books. Glee. Estate sales, art museums and bookstores. Soft sheets. Candy. The kids at AOS. Palindromes. Chris Isaak.