The area around our little town of Port Orford is home to a lot of interesting and talented people, and our friends Stephen and Eve Thompson, are certainly among them. Steve has been a professional photographer for most of his adult life, and his skill in taking and editing remarkable pictures is second to none. He's probably forgotten more about photography than I'll ever know, and he's been an enormous help to me in my humble efforts to learn this craft.
One of Steve's areas of special expertise is in stitching - the technique of taking multiple photographs and "stitching" them together to make a homogeneous photograph composed of all of them. This technique has been used by others as a way of producing panoramic shots, but Steve frequently will use both vertical and horizontal rows of images, all stitched together to form a single picture with incredible sharpness and detail. He also has a technique for combining multiple exposures of the same image, focused at different "depths." This produces totally sharp images with an extraordinary depth of field that would never be possible by conventional means - especially useful for macro photography.
Aside from his obvious skills as a photographer, Steve specializes in the restoration and enhancement of old and/or historic photographs, and is a thoroughly nice guy. When he gets an interesting mushroom photo, he invariably forwards it to us, and with his permission, we are printing a few of them here, and scattered through other pages in our website. To see more of his work, visit his website, www.earthseaimagery.com.
Bleeding Hydnellum
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