Artist of the Month at Coffee Time...

Beth Payne

Her dad was a photographer, but working and raising kids put that hobby on the back burner. It showed a little, here and there, when he handed her a camera an she went off to click away at the roses, the trees, the leaves. He developed the photos, and she didn't seem happy with the result. She didn't want to have her eyes and the pictures to be different. She then decided to figure out why and how to make it work for her. She took all the arts in school, she was creative and didn't want to stop learning about art or artistic endeavors.

Her dad cultivated the photography with cameras for gifts; first, a point-and-shoot in middle school, to a better one in high school, to an older single lens reflex fo her college photography class, and finally, her current prized digital single lens reflex. It's probably a decade old, outdated mega-pixel rate, obsolete compact flash system and was created before shooting in RAW was all the hype. It's her tool, the conduit to produce what she wants everyone else to see. She wanders the city, looking for rust and peeling paint, cool graffiti, anything that catches her eye. She takes multiple angles, she wants to zoom in and pan out so everyone can see something different than the normal, the usual, the typical. She wants to show everyone that there's beauty in the dirt and grime, wonderful things to see where most people would ignore or overlook. She likes how things rust away, because it's yet another life being created from destruction.

She uses her camera to show a different side of the world. She spends her free time searching second hand stores for frames to use for display. She also spends some time in her garage with some sand paper or some spray paint on these frames. It's a labor of love before the final steps toward a complete piece. She loves how each frame is different in order to fit the photo, blemishes and all. And she loves photography.