Is it a painting?

When you see my art in person, you may very well be fooled into thinking you are viewing paintings, but you are viewing Enhanced Digital Images (EDI). Does it matter to you that my image printed on Canvas, Paper or Aluminum was put on the media by an intelligently controlled aqueous pigment sprayer (fine art ink-jet printer)?

In the late 1990's, I started to figure out how to print images that I shot at the Norwalk Maritime Aquarium, using an early sub-megapixel Olympus Digital camera. If you have ever visited an Aquarium, you should remember that the habitats are made to show the approximate amount of light in the animals' natural habitat, so it may be very difficult to make good images in the low light. Instead of showing these terrible little photos, I discovered various ways to use Paint Shop Pro and Adobe photoshop on a custom built Windows computer to explore the image information that was buried in the original dark image.

It seems that viewers bunch my art in with oil and acrylic painting as my art pieces have texture and depth when viewed at a distance - these enhancements draw in the viewer who usually looks left and then right, just before raising a finger to touch the image. It has been my experience that people get very excited when they discover my work is in fact, not painted onto the media. People start asking questions like, ..."what is enhanced digital photography?" ..."why does if look so like a painting, and then people get drawn into the conversation.