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KELLY COLEMAN

Many artists start their careers with an inherent passion to create art in a certain style or medium.  Other artists build on their interests and talents and ultimately find their direction along the way.  With Brett Donnelly, owner of Brett Donnelly Photography, he sort of “fell into” his love of light.

With vision or sight being one of the most prevalent of senses, it has fascinated nature photographer Donnelly from the beginning.  Brett is an expert in light source technologies and has a unique stance being an artist that understands the science of light along with an appreciation for its natural beauty.  Combining his technical background as a lighting designer with a love and talent for nature photography, Brett has been diligently pursuing his dream of documenting the natural world for the last five years.

Donnelly played tennis and spent as much time as possible outdoors while growing up in Vero Beach. “I’ve always been very much into nature, I love the outdoors – I have a very adventurous family that spent a lot of time traveling in the car to the mountains in the western United States.  Photography was fun as a child, but it was for the purpose of documenting trips.  It was never an artistic expression.”

This changed about seven years ago when Brett and his grandfather took a trip to the Arctic.  Within six months Brett then also took a second trip hiking in southern Chili.  As Brett began dabbling with photography and experimenting with his knowledge of light, he realized how to best use his unique abilities.  “Learning to use a camera was easy for me and I already ‘knew’ light – I had produced it in laboratories and had designed it for architectural buildings.  Now I was taking the three dimensional world and trying to make it ascetically pleasing in two dimensions – which is no easy task.  It’s taken me some time to figure out composition.”

As Brett started dabbling with artistic expression through natural light photography, he realized his growing interest in low level lighting.  Subsequently, he then began to explore a fourth dimension in his art, the dimension of time.  Brett explains long exposure using one of his gallery photographs, Rocky Shore, “By capturing a small amount of light over a long period of time – it’s sort of “painting” the picture into my composition.  So, it is almost like two images in one:  you get all of the movement in the water but the rocks stay perfectly still.  And all my images are taken in one shot, there is no post-editing.”

Brett researches and plans all of his photography trips with a very deliberate mission. All of his shots are of nature and all are in natural light.  Nothing is fabricated and not much is unexpected. Brett even considers lunar cycles and sunset times as it makes a massive difference in the image that he carefully plans to capture and create. “A camera is designed to emulate our vision.  But it does a horrible job of it.  Realistically, the way that I shoot, it is most often very dark – in the early hours of morning.  And, most of the time it does not look like what you see in my pictures.  But I have begun to understand what it will look like just through experience and having an understanding of refracting light and atmospheric conditions.”

With those conditions constantly changing, light also shifts and changes over a period of time.  Brett picks up on subtleties with his camera that the eye does not see as he paints with light through his long exposure photography technique.  All of the changes are translated to film and then ultimately to each distinctively unique and purposely exquisite print.

One of Donnelly’s artistic goals includes creating the largest landscape photography images available with the resolution or detail of each print normally being about ten feet wide.  Projected onto light sensitive Fuji paper for a determined amount of time, each piece is an actual photograph that is chemically bathed and hung in the dark room. The entire process takes approximately 3 hours as Brett signs and numbers each final piece.  Combine size, resolution, length of exposure, color and composition and Donnelly is essentially creating extraordinary four dimensional images of nature.

With another goal of making his photo’s “like a window on the wall,” he wants each image to be as clear and focused as possible.  Donnelly has utterly perfected the art of having everything in focus.  Brett explains, “A lot of times a photographer is trying to capture a specific moment, but it is difficult to make that moment feel real.  I want to surround you in a moment.  All of these places are beautiful and if you are there at the right time, there are those magical moments.  My job is to capture those magical moments and make them feel realistic when you hang them on the wall.”

Donnelly has trained his eye when he peers through the camera lens to picture what he sees on the wall.  This method is, in its purest form, his art – the way he mounts, displays, lights and presents his picture.  It’s not about the moment he is in the field taking the image…it is about the moment that you are looking at the image and taking it in.  Donnelly shares, “My goal is to show the diversity of our world.  I shoot tundra, glaciers, rainforests, prairies, mountains, beaches, and lakes – I want to present our world in all of its natural beauty.  I want to share my appreciation for how incredible nature is.”

Brett Donnelly Photography is located in Historic Downtown at 1935 14^th Avenue.

Brett allows potential buyers to bring art to their homes on a trial basis and most of his work is made to order with 250 signed and numbered prints of each image or photo.

For additional information on sizing and prices visit Brett’s website online at http://www.brettdonnelly.com