There is no theme for the competition

Jim Steele

While coming from a traditional film/darkroom background, Jim is equally comfortable in both traditional and digital technologies.  His work includes landscape, flowers, figurative, and surreal photography.  He has a studio at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA. His photographs are included in many corporate and private collections.

He has guest lectured in photography at Georgetown University and taught for the Art League in Alexandria Virginia, the Smithsonian, and Glen Echo’s Photoworks. He frequently lectures on the subject of visual literacy and darkroom and digital workflows.

He and his wife are members of the Photography Initiative at the National Gallery of Art in DC.

Jim’s interest (obsession) in flower photography started when he was walking to his car one day and noticed a tiger lily in the flower bed beside the driveway.  It was starting to wilt and he thought it was still beautiful.  He took it down to the studio to photograph, and, using focus stacking to overcome the shallow depth of field, he ended up with a final focused digital file consisting of over a hundred stacked images. The rest is history. 

Many of Jim’s favorite images are scenes he has been drawn to that most people might not photograph.  Jim calls them  “Images I Like, But Nobody Else Will.”