John Reuter Photography

John Reuter Biography

JOHN REUTER has been a photographer since the early 1970s, majoring in Art while attending SUNY Geneseo. He continued his studies on the graduate level at the University of Iowa, receiving two master’s degrees. It was there that he began to specialize in Polaroid materials, most notably his SX-70 constructions, combining photography with painting and collage. Reuter joined Polaroid Corporation in 1978 as senior photographer and later Director of the legendary 20x24 Studio. His own work evolved through large scale Polacolor Image Transfers to digital imaging in the mid 1990’s. He has taught workshops in Photoshop, Lightroom, Polaroid materials and encaustic painting around the world. In recent years Reuter has moved into video and filmmaking and is currently working on a feature length documentary titled "Camera Ready: The Polaroid 20x24 Project".

John is currently a part time faculty member at the University of Hartford in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Hartford Art School. He teaches courses in in analog and digital photography as well as cinema studies.

Lightroom and Digital Photographhy

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Lightroom and Digital Photography with John Reuter at Palm Beach Photographic Centre

Description
Since its inception Lightroom has been a program designed to get the most out of digital cameras. While Photoshop continues to be the program of choice for photographers, designers, illustrators, pre-press specialists, composite artists and digital painters, Lightroom takes a more measured approach in being a more effective program for photographers shooting with the new generation of digital cameras.In this workshop we will learn to create catalogs, import our images from our cameras, decide on a folder structure that makes sense to you, backup to an additional drive, apply your copyright, add keywords, and render previews to suit your needs.Exploiting the Library Module, we will work more with keywording, rating and flagging images and learn to filter your view of images based on Metadata, Attributes and Keywords. This will allow you to quickly access the images you want when you want to see them.Once we are comfortable with where our images are and how to find them we can begin to explore the Develop Module, where some very powerful tools reside. Learn to properly set your white and black point through manipulation of the Exposure and Black sliders and then refine with Brightness and Contrast, then pull back information with Recovery and Fill Light and make additional refinements utilizing Clarity and Vibrancy.Want more? Lightroom also offers parametric Tone Curve adjustments, very sophisticated Hue, Saturation and Luminance controls and excellent Sharpening and Noise Reduction. This workshop will guide you in a steady and consistent manner to master these essential controls. Once mastered, we will explore saving adjustments as Developer Presets, allowing us to apply effects to another image or multiples of images.The Develop Module now contains tools for Spot Removal, Red Eye Reduction, a Graduated Filter for zoned local control of develop adjustments and the Adjustment Brush for specific local control of adjustments. For some photographers this means perhaps never needing a program like Photoshop, which at one time was the only way to make these final refinements.The Print, Slideshow and Web Modules round out the program. The Print Module, greatly improved, offers template presets that allow you to lock in your print settings and apply them to a cue of multiple images, offering significant advantages over Photoshop.Discover why more and more digital photographers are embracing Lightroom and finding it their preferred tool for importing, sorting and processing their images. Come discover the streamlined power of Adobe Lightroom!

SX-70: Where it all began.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Even though I had been working in creative photography since 1972, I regard my first mature work to exist in the Polaroid SX-70 Imagery I began in 1974 and continued through 1980. Using techniques I refer to as SX-70 Construction and SX-70 Transfer, I utilized this medium to create these multimedia collages. My influences were clearly Surrealist painters such as Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Dorthea Tanning and expressive painters such as Francis Bacon. Disassembling and reassembling the photograph I added collage and paint. Since all manipulations were exacted from behind, the image still retained the smooth homogeneous glossy surface when viewed from the front. I enjoyed the miniature scale of these constructions, they had an almost jewel like appearance. This body of work was one of my most exciting to create and it influences my current work to this day.