I grew up in the big city of Chicago and my early interests were in the sciences. Having had all my college academics finished by my junior year, I took a major leap and ended up with a degree in painting, minor in photography. Then I went through all the steps of merging art with science, painting with photography. I used a 35 mm camera, shot with a slow speed film in natural light, I liked the grainy texture of the images and it worked out well as I was painting and drawing on the enlarged prints, way before digital, natch. I loved Chicago and considered myself a lifer until I visited San Francisco, moved here a year later and have been here almost 50 years now.
I raised orchids as my main subject and started shooting multiple images, almost always two shots, often with a moving flower at the tip of its long stem, and in the other photo totally still. Other combination still life images would involve objects moved or shot from a different angle or with different lighting or even having the camera intentionally moving in one of the shots with the slow speed film. I was earning money as a gardener and window display craftsman at the time. I always had an eye for style and even had a newspaper article about my window work. Then in the eighties, I got into the color xerox and mail art crazes and started creating one of a kind postcards with my wry wit and word play. But as the demand for my art cards grew, I became a slave to those art cards and had to stop, just in time with the advent of computers and email.
I am back to photos again, single images now, and back to using orchids and jungle cactus flowers mostly grown outdoors, as well as all the wonders from San Francisco's everyday life.
Michael May
Michael May joined Pixels.com Licensing on March 11th, 2020.