The Artist

Well, I started out as a child.

My name is Clarence Harwell and I grew up in Southern California, having arrived there from Texas just before my 10th birthday. For the past few years I have been located on the Oregon coast. My interest in fine art photography came along in the early 70s when I was stationed on Okinawa in the First Special Forces Group, the Army Green Berets. Camera gear was plentiful and cheap on Okinawa and I purchased my first camera. It was a Canon FTB. Film back in those days. No digital. No automatic camera. You had to learn your stuff or end up with a lot of unusable photographs. I read everything I could get my hands on. No personal computers then, so it was books and magazines.

After returning to civilian life, I returned to school for Architecture, but that love of photography, and the desire to do it for a living kept driving me towards that career. For almost 3 decades I had a photography studio in Southern California and loved every minute of it. I did portraits, weddings and commercial photography for thousands of clients.

All the time spent in the studio and on location did not quell my love of the outdoors and capturing the natural light as it played across the landscape. And one thing about landscape; it doesn’t move just as you click the shutter. It never blinks at the wrong time. It is quiet and you can go out with your own thoughts and just capture the beauty that is in front of the lens. You can create the art that is the landscape of planet. It is out there and the landscape, along with the light makes the subject a work of photographic art.

I learned early that in photography, light is what makes the magic. Light, and the control of it is what separates an amateur from a professional. In the studio, I had complete control of the light. In the outdoors, gazing at a landscape, that control is gone. But you can control the time of day, and the weather you are out photographing in. Sometimes you just wait. Or go back another day. I find myself revisiting locations over and over, just to see what the light is doing. I have been influenced by the early greats like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and they were ALL about the light.

To create a great Fine Art Image, one must be very lucky or very persistent, and of course know your photography. It often involves getting up early or staying up late to get the light that will turn an OK image into Fine Art. It is the light that gives a photographic image the ability to evoke a response of wonderment when viewing it. That sense of wonderment caused by the landscape and the light falling on it is what I want to evoke each time I click the shutter.

My goal as a fine art photographer is to show you views of nature in ways that you may not have seen them before. I use careful composition, pay attention to detail and the light. Always the light. My entire collection is available in the form of fine art prints using only the highest quality printing and mounting processes available today.

I hope you find something here to give you a feeling of wonderment, if even for just the short time you are on my website. Thank you for stopping by, and if something does reach out a grab you, I would be honored for you to have it hanging on your wall.