Greg Cradick - Digital Guru With a Fine Art Background by Mark Lapin

Greg Cradick is that rare hybrid - a guru of digital photography who is proficient with pencil and paintbrush, deeply grounded in traditional fine art, and fascinated by Eastern philosophy. His landscape and portrait work has been exhibited in more than 20 group and solo shows.

Greg is also a dedicated teacher. As Executive Director of Working with Artists, a widely-respected school of fine art photography in Denver, Greg leads workshops in all aspects of digital photography. But he also transcends technique with courses such as Contemplative Photography, The Third Eye and Seeing Beyond Sight. Greg is now bringing his varied talents and unique vision to students at the Digital Photo Academy.

‘I love the workshop environment,’ he says, ‘because it really helps me as an artist to be around other people who are interested in photography and art. I try to be an open book, and take people wherever they want to go. But even when I impart intense technical knowledge, it’s all deeply saturated in that fine art perspective. Here’s the technical stuff, and here’s the nuance that turns it into gorgeous images.’

Photographers are notorious for entering the profession from all walks of life but Greg must be one of the very few whose journey began in a puppet theater. Growing up in Washington, D.C., Greg was guided into the arts by his grandmother, a successful marionette artist, painter and gallery owner. ‘She built her own marionettes, designed their clothes, painted them, and had her own theater,’ he says. ‘She was really stellar through the 70’s and 80’s, and her work is now in the Atlanta Puppet Museum.’

As a kid, Greg helped backstage at the puppet theater, and worked in his grandmother’s gallery, learning about painting, framing and the eccentricities of artists. Still fascinated by theater after high school, he started working as a designer of stage lighting for plays and performances. ‘My goal was always to create light that looked and felt natural,’ he says. ‘I started paying more attention to light, and I began photographing performers in my lighting set-ups.’

Once Greg started working with lights, camera and people, he discovered a new direction for his talents. Deciding to drop theater and shift his focus to photography, he enrolled in the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he earned a BA in photography, with an emphasis on historical printmaking techniques such as photogravure.

His total immersion in the digital came after college, when he landed a coveted job as first assistant to a celebrity portrait photographer. Working with NBA stars and A-list actors like Eddie Murphy, the photographer typically shot hundreds of images in a session. Her assistant was supposed to Photoshop all the best body parts from all the images into one gorgeous and seamless portrait. ‘She needed an absolute Photoshop expert, and I was really worried about my skills,’ Greg confesses. ‘But she didn’t even look at my credentials. She just asked to see my painting portfolio to make sure I understood color, proportions and perspective. Then she knew I’d be okay.’

In his fine art photography, Greg focuses on people, places, and the camera’s ability to transcend literal truth. ‘People think the camera shows reality,’ he says, ‘but it’s really just the photographer’s version of events. A lot of my work deals with that tangle where truth and fiction overlap.’

Greg sees portraiture as a three-way conversation evolving over time between subject, photographer and viewer. He continues to experiment with lighting, especially with mixtures of studio and natural light. ‘A lot of photographers and students ask me to describe my typical portrait setup. But it all depends on the subject. It’s totally different for a man, woman or child. I don’t really have a preference as to whom I shoot, or a stock way of shooting people. I just kind of react to what they bring forth.’

In his landscapes, Greg works with natural light and prefers to focus on significant details rather than the grand architecture of the scene. He calls his style Intimate Landscape. ‘I’m interested in how little you can include and still express the essence of the scene in its entirety,’ he says. Many of his landscapes are black and white. He rarely manipulates the image but does take advantage of digital to stitch dozens of overlapping frames together in huge 180-degree panoramas.

Greg also tries to capture the ‘Spirituality of Place.’ In his recent series of volcanic landscapes from the big island of Hawaii, he explores cycles of birth-death-rebirth by photographing lava as it bubbles out of the ground to create new earth in lush landscapes that look like they’ve been there for eternity. ‘There’s something magical about watching earth being created as I’m making the photograph,’ he says.

Greg’s current series of Denver cityscapes is a good example of how he uses real elements to present an altered reality. By reversing the front and rear standards on his 4x5 camera, he creates a wrong-end-of-the telescope vision of the city. ‘I play with proportions and depth of field to make Denver seem almost like a toy city, a model train-set. It’s a way of creating an intimate look at the city, as well as nature.’

Greg’s fine-art background has convinced him that that most photographers can benefit from understanding color with a painter’s eye and applying the classic rules of two-dimensional composition to the photo frame. But he also believes that photography is a ‘blessed medium because you don’t need to be able to draw or mix paint to very easily and naturally express the way your mind sees things to anyone who has an eye. We’re making a lot of images now as a society, and if we can consciously make the most beautiful, artful images we’re capable of creating, even if they’re just photos of the family dog, we’ll be better off as people and as a society.’

Greg Cradick lives with his wife Jane, a certified acupuncturist, in Denver. Both enjoy hiking, camping and photographing Colorado’s incredible natural environment.