Kat Larsen

Phil Herwegh

I first became interested in photography around 1975 and started taking photography classes at a local community college. I built a black and white darkroom in my house and spent many happy hours printing pictures that I had taken. After several years my enthusiasm waned and I gave up photography until I retired and moved to Carlsbad in 1993. Since then I have been doing color photography and entering my work in shows such as the Del Mar Fair and the annual North County Photographic Society exhibition. Then came new computer equipment and Photoshop. Over the past few years I have concentrated my photographic efforts on altering and enhancing photos with the computer.

I’ve always envied painting artists because they can stand in front of a scene and recreate the image as their mind’s eye sees it, without telephone wires, poles and debris in the street. Manipulating my images digitally was my way of doing the same thing. I could clean up the canvas and my photo-painting more closely resembled the scene as I wanted to see it. That was the beginning. Later I began to experiment with color, moving closer to abstraction and fusing the essence of the image with unconventional concepts. My move away from traditional photography has been taken in small steps and is still evolving. The computer and its software have allowed me to become an artist.