Why Are The Sands White?

After nearly loosing his eyesight in 2011 Louis decided to take up photography again in order to leave something behind in print form should he become totally blind. Thus, he bought a Leica M9 digital camera. Since being a newspaper and yearbook photographer while attending University about 45 years earlier, Louis had not had much time to take serious photographs while building a career. Currently one of his eyes is a write off with the other eye still on the watch list. So for the moment, he sees like a camera with one single lens. His greatest challenge in taking up photography again is attempting to understand and use the digital darkroom. As for image making, on the one hand, Louis is a photographer who likes to capture earthy, gritty, emotional and moving street scenes with a worldly emphasis. At times his street images nearly become portraiture since he does not orchestrate his captures, but nevertheless, he moves in close. In order to accomplish this Louis believes there are times when one must have a connection with or interact with the people one photographs even though there might be a language barrier. Louis also considers himself someone who likes to capture the openness and solitude of the beautiful and moving landscape environment where one's artistic juices are allowed the freedom to flow to their maximum. Sometimes that means dramatic colors and other times it means capturing scenes in strong and intense black and white images. All in all, Louis enjoys creating images that have an impact on himself and for others. He loves to travel and find interacting with and taking street portraits of those he meets very gratifying. Louis tries to catch that special glow given off by each person. He also likes to capture images with intense colors that evoke viewer emotions. To Louis, this often means images with color that epitomizes sunrises or sunsets with strong and interesting composition. Louis has been fortunate in having his images featured on the Leica Blog three times from 2014 to 2016 where first the Blog featured landscape images by Louis, then they interviewed Louis about his black and white street shooting techniques and images and lastly images of the Cuban people were featured by Louis using a Leica Q. Also, Leica Stores have presented landscape works of the American South West by Louis in their Washington, DC and Las Vegas Galleries. Louis was also fortunate to win the Jay Colson Portfolio Award in 2016 at FOTOfusion in West Palm Beach Florida where over 50 photojournalists, photojournalistic editors and professional photographers judged his portfolio the best. In fact, as a truly remarkable accomplishment, Louis won this award three years in a row from 2014 until 2016. During the 2016 Award presentation, Louis thanked Peter Turnley with helping start him shooting street photography and helping in his street shooting successes. During one FOTOfusion Louis also won the 3 hour Leica Single Image Competition Award and won a Leica camera.