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,
I think I was afraid it might lose it's magic if I did. 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 CS3, 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. Staying up late. Breezes. History. Stories,
movies and books. Estate sales, art museums and bookstores.
Soft sheets. Candy. The kids at AOS. Palindromes. Chris Isaak.
Not so fond of clutter, traffic, bugs, chaos.