Photography Club
Sun City Texas
Featured Photographer
Burton Anes
Hello. I’m Burton Anes. I’m a photography junky. I’ve lived here in Sun City for 7 years, after 23 years in Houston. I’ve also lived in NY, Ct, Massachusetts, Maine and Hawaii..
As a kid I started out thinking I was going to be an artist. Photography turned out to be my favorite and best medium... so far. Over the years I’ve shot about 100 magazine covers. I’ve done a few weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, and hated the experiences. In Houston I had a part-time Boudoir photo studio. I enjoyed that experience.
For the last three years, I’ve used a small Canon digital camera that I always have on my belt. When I dropped it a year ago, it stopped zooming, so I’ve only used it at wide angle while searching for another camera. In June, I finally bought a Panasonic Lumix “bridge camera” because it was relatively light-weight, has a very sharp, built-in long zoom lens, and is easy for travel.
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Blue Bonnets, Old Buildings, Ranch Life. Jim Bilbro, Date & Time TBD
Blue Bonnets, Old Buildings, Ranch Life. Jim Bilbro, Date & Time TBD
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I’ve given many talks. Since I’ve been going to Duluth for the summers, I’ve given 2 photography talks at the U of Minnesota, and 2 at the Tweed Museum (in Duluth).
In 2006, I was chosen to be the first Featured Photographer of the Month for the Visual Arts /Photo SIG. Now I’ve been chosen to be the first Featured Photographer of the Month for January ‘09, for our brand new Photography Club. I appreciate the honors. It’s good to be the photo club founder and first president. .
When I got my first camera in 1958, I knew nothing about photography. Then, just getting photos back from Kodak was fun enough. Over the years, as I read many magazines and books; including Ansel Adams’ series, I became very involved with technique. I bought a densitometer to read film base density to use with the Zone System. I always used my tripod. I measured and mixed all the separate chemicals on a balance scale for developing and printing. I bought larger format cameras up to 4x5. I joined numerous photo clubs. At one club only 16x20” black & white prints were brought in for competition each month. I also belonged to the Photographic Society of America Subminature SIG, where I even learned how to make sharp 8x10s from teeny-tiny negatives that could compete with prints from 35mm. Too much of my photography time had really become an exercise in engineering .
Photo quality was better, but my photos had become boring. I was spending way to much time on technique. I decided to “forget” technique and just have fun with photography again. It worked! I was happy that way for many years until digital photography came along. Thanks to wonderful photo editing software and digital cameras (computers that take pictures) the photographic process has become another siren song. It is so easy to spend too much time over-involved in learning the latest and greatest Photoshop “secrets” to the exclusion of spending that time shooting interesting pictures. It’s a fight I don’t always win, but I keep trying.
I’ve been asked to represent my 50 years in photography with just a few photos. It has been very difficult to choose them. Here is a random potpourri of people, places, close-ups, and photo journalism; in color and a couple in black & white.
Enjoy! Burton Anes
'You learn to see by practice. It's just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.' -Eliot Porter
