David Kachel Photographer

...The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley... (Robert Burns)

Welcome. My name is David Kachel (pronounced: cockle)...

As you may have gathered I am a photographer. More specifically a fine art photographer (I prefer simply, artist-photographer; it is more succinct and sounds less arrogant), which means you're supposed to be very impressed!

What it really means is that I am an artist who happens to use a camera instead of a paintbrush or a chisel and that instead of making photographs that are records of what was in front of the camera, I use what was in front of the camera as one of the ingredients to produce what I envisioned. Ordinary photography is a literal record of the scene in front of the camera, fine art photography is not. The fine art photographer takes the illusion of reality recorded by the camera and turns it into something new and very different, while maintaing that all-important illusion. Art does not come out of cameras. It comes out of people.

Unfortunately, lots of literal photographs are being held up as fine art photographs, especially now that tens of thousands of wedding, bar mitzvah and portrait photographers have discovered they can earn extra money by passing off their vacation pictures as art. Google the phrase fine art photographer and take note of the number of resulting web sites that in reality belong to wedding and portrait photographers.

My work is for sale at very reasonable prices and I make those photographs using only the best pigment inks on the finest 100% cotton rag papers. For a quick glance at pricing click on the Purchase button to the left.

To go straight to my photographs, click on the Gallery button.

If you are interested in a little bit of a biography or in reading some of my past magazine articles, click on History.

The Monographs button will take you to a page where you can read my more recent writings. They have to do more with the art and business of art photography while the articles under the history button are all technical in nature and related to analog photography exclusively.

Contact is self-explanatory.

The world of fine art photography is changing very rapidly. Photographers like myself have started capturing images with digtal cameras and making prints not in the darkroom, but with a high-end photo grade digital printer. To practically everyone's surprise, my own especially, these printers are capable of rendering better looking and longer lasting images than traditional gelatin silver printing. And they continue to improve at a very rapid rate. I have already torn up and thrown out several older gelatin silver prints from my inventory because the digital prints from those negatives were so much better I didn't want to keep the older prints.

The buying and selling of photographs is also in the midst of drastic changes. In the past, fine art photographers were almost entirely dependent on galleries and museums to allow us access to the buying public. No more. The internet has leveled the playing field and now collectors can follow us directly on the internet without interference from middlemen. And there is one other bonus, a big one for photography fans...

Though the amount of work and expense needed to arrive at the first final digital print of an image is oddly, largely the same amount of work as it was with conventional analog photography, the second print is infinitely easier and, unlike silver-gelatin, absolutely identical. This means that despite the fact the quality of photographs is going up thanks to digital print making, and the life expectancy of those prints is also increasing, photographers like myself are discovering that we can afford to charge less for our work and therefore reach a wider audience! This means that for the first time, the collecting of fine, museum quality original photographs is available to the general public at reasonable prices.