Note: The following is part of our Creative Tech series. Creative Tech aims to educate and inform creative professionals about the ways technology can enhance their creative work experience.
More than a photographer, Sherry Pritz combines distinctive images with artistic enhancements to create her signature contemporary style. Working in both black and white, and color, she highlights certain aspects of an original photograph, with results resembling a painting. By selecting and skillfully layering a palette of colors, her subjects take on a surreal, sometimes abstract feel and a completely unique perspective emerges. Her work, with an urban appeal, commands attention in business and private settings—as an organic backdrop or a shining focal point. A diverse range of subjects takes viewers from the simplest location in nature to exotic landmarks.
Pritz, a photographer and creative artist, has been using Photoshop to create stunning images for several years. Her “Manhattan Skewed” (see image above) is a perfect example. It is one of her finest pieces of creative artistry. It is shown here printed on canvas in a large format. A closer look reveals magnificent detail and it’s hard to decide if it’s a painting or a photograph. She outsources printing of her work in large formats to several specialist firms across the country.
She almost exclusively works with images that she has captured with her Nikon D1 digital single lens reflex camera. She spends hours, sometimes even days, deciding on how and at what time of day or night to capture her images. The initial composition of her shot can certainly make or break her ability to create something compelling and unique with it later in her process.
In her studio, she has several 1 TB USB hard drives for storage and backup. She has a backup drive offsite, too. In an effort to be respectful of her own work and to be prudent, she also subscribes to a cloud backup service for additional peace of mind. Her backup happens automatically and works for PC, Mac and mobile devices. All backed up devices can be synced so she has access at anytime on whatever device she has with her.
Once she captures a great image, her creative side takes over. Like many Photoshop pros, she employs many of her own unique combinations of filters, layers and effects to transform her image into something new, beautiful and provocative. Her style is contemporary and she often enhances and dramatically colorizes her images for a surreal affect.
It is not unusual for her edited images to grow in file size dramatically as she creates something stunning with them. The file size for the above image is approximately 100GB as shown and it represents many hours of intense creativity. She requires storage and backup that she can count on to preserve her efforts and intellectual property. Her fascinating images grace the walls of both corporate (BMO Harris Bank Center, EIGERlab Business Incubator…) and many private clients.
Visit her website www.pritzphotography.com for more examples of her striking creativity!
OWC offers a complete selection of hard drives and SSDs to satisfy the most demanding needs of both hobbyists and creative professionals such as Sherry Pritz.
• Roger Adler is a freelance composer/producer/performer who has played more than 4,500 live gigs from smoky bars to the Inaugural Ball for the President of the United States. He has played on more than 1,000 TV commercials as a guitarist and even played on the soundtrack for and appeared in the movie Groundhog Day. As a composer, his clients include Comic Relief on A&E, HBO, PBS (NOVA) WTTW Chicago and many more. He has received four EMMY Nominations for his music for TV and his TV show Wild Chicago won many Emmy awards. He also co-wrote and produced the debut single by Michael Lynch from THE VOICE TV show.
What Photoshop urgently needs is a Taste Filter.