Painter of the Month

Photographer of the Month: Dennis Bernhardt

Did you ever meet someone who always makes everything you do together better than good? I mean when working with this person you get the clear sense the world is fresh and good? Where the world can light up with this wonderful blend of the smart, the wry, the curious, the determined, the humorous, the creative?

It's not an uncommon sight for Dennis Bernhardt to roll into a session wearing oversized Tasmanian Devil slippers and slick hat while rocking a perfectly manicured beard one week and then show up the next week with pristine white sneakers, a striped, collared dress shirt, fashionable jeans and smelling like after shave- sans beard of course. He's had spiked hair, perfectly combed hair and during the summer months, he shaves it all off, military style...

From our studio on the third floor of Princeton University's Department of Creative Arts, Dennis directs the Flying Eye camera to scan the scene down on the street. Because the camera he controls is handled by an A.R.T. Tracker, Dennis will be able to go anywhere, access unlimited vantages that transcend the limits of his wheelchair. While Dennis pilots the A.R.T. Flying Eye photography system, he sees what the camera sees via a live video feed to his computer.

Camera in hand, Flying Eye Tracker Ray D'Andrade heads out of the building. Tracker Darren McManus remains in the studio with Dennis, translating Dennis's non-verbal directives to Ray and to the A.R.T. Flying Eye camera, which for now is Dennis's camera. The previous session Dennis had Ray hike all over town, but not today. Dennis has something else in mind. Using his head-mounted laser he points to directives/icons on a set of sophisticated menu boards.

Directives such as: Zoom in. Zoom out. Pan left. Pan right. Angle down. Angle up. Keep walking.

Dennis trains the bright red bead of the laser on the directive: Slow 360 pan.

Dennis directs: Stop. The camera stops. He directs: Up. . Up more. Up. The image feeding back from the camera slowly rises until the buildings are gone, so the top of the tallest tree is gone, until there is nothing but sky. Dennis is taking us up and away from the normal world, up, up, up into the sky. Dennis can't talk but boy does he know what he wants, what he's after. Dennis didn't go to art school and boy did he not need to. Why? Because he's a real deal artist, sure of finding his own way.

As he composes clouds and sky, selecting, directing still shots be captured, a tiny plane crosses the field of blue and puffy white summer clouds. The laser points to the menu board, "Take it!" he directs, the cameraperson receives the directive, the shutter clicks. "Got it" photo Tracker Ray D'Andrade calls back over the voice line.

Here is a bit of an email Master Tracker Darren McManus wrote me about the session with Dennis the following week:

"Worked with Dennis on the computer yesterday...we went over the very basics of Photoshop...purely to crop an image, change the brightness or contrast of an image and even selecting a section of an image to be used as a new photo. Using the guides in Photoshop is exactly like a virtual representation of the A.R.T. point system for painting, so he caught on extremely quickly and was totally into it...I could tell he was seeing all the possibilities of what the application could do and he was into it big time. He selected two of his photos from Wednesday’s session that he said were the ones he wanted sent to the reporter...and of course, they were the best ones. They were two of his cloud photos - beautiful baby blue sky with white, puffy clouds scattered across the picture plane...and one of them was the one with the passenger plane in the bottom left section...so small, barely visible but Dennis got such a hoot out of this. The coolest thing, I think, is what happened next...I explained to him the zoom tool and clicked on the teeny, barely recognizable image of the plane, and boom, all of a sudden, he's looking at the plane in better detail. He loses it...he's totally puzzled but gets it immediately when I zoom in and out showing him that it's the same image, we're just zoning in on one small area. Of course, he immediately begins motioning for me to zoom in, and once he gets the plane to a decent size, he has me crop the image on three of the four sides so the plane is perfectly centered in this baby blue setting, no clouds, just a plane in a sea of blue.”