About Double Dog Press

I mainly photograph New York City and its environs, Upstate New York and Long Island, and also Maine and California. I like to photograph many types of subjects, not just landscapes or buildings, but also still lifes. I started taking pictures seriously in 1999 and spent many years in darkrooms. Whatever I shoot, I look for several things in an image: interesting structure, tonality, and intrinsic beauty, the beauty of a thing in itself. I've tried to reflect that in all my images and in the greeting cards, which allow you to share my art work with many others.

Tools of the Trade

For digital images I use a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a variety of "L" lenses. For non-digital images I use a Pentax 67-II (medium format), a Wisner 4x5, or Deardorff (8x10), both large-format, and shoot mostly on Tri-X B&W film developed in HC-110 (for those who care about such things).

I am located at:
350 W 55TH ST
NEW YORK, NY 10019

More about me...

In 1999 I became seriously interested in photography. Naturally beginning with 35mm color film, the most accessible format, my preference quickly became black and white and more formal imagery. After purchasing my first Pentax67 and learning how to do my own prints and negatives, I got to work learning as much as I could about this field.

I've worked with several cameras and methodologies: staring with a Canon Rebel, then a Pentax 67, Wisner 4x5, and a Deardorff 8x10, producing images using silver gelatin and also platinum printing. Recently I've been using a Canon 5D Mark II, with "L" lenses and now I output all my photographs on an Epson 3800 printer.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS4 to prepare my photographs for printing (and also the web). I also use Adobe Bridge CS4 to modify both the tiff files from the scanned images as well as the CR2 (Camera Raw) files from the Canon 5D Mark II. The book Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS4 by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe changed the way I process digital images and I highly recommend it.

My background

I grew up in Los Angeles. In 1970 I got my undergraduate degree in History at Washburn University of Topeka, Kansas. In graduate school at Kansas University, I majored in Chinese Language and Literature, and got my M.A. in 1973, writing my M.A. on the Chinese author Bing Xin.

Later on, I attended Columbia University (1982-1987), and worked toward a Ph.D. in Chinese History, concentrating on Neo-Confucianism, which is basically Confucian philosophy from about the early 900s to 1911.

In my first couple of years after moving to New York City in 1973, I worked at various jobs, among them an interpreter for an acupuncturist, private detective (I lasted two days), then, for several years I worked as a contract negotiator in China for an English trading company and became fluent enough in Chinese that in China, where I made several extended business trips for commodity negotiations, people often thought I worked for the Liaison Office (the precursor to our embassy) in an official capacity. After that, I worked at a literary and theater magazine, then as a typesetter, and IT manager of a private investigator firm.

Since the late 1980s, I've been a full time computer programmer and IT Development Manager, coding in C++, Java, C#, VB.Net, PL/SQL (Oracle), and managing systems on Unix.

—Ronald Gans

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