Charlie Stannard

Director

I am married with two children and five grandchildren. My working life involved advertising and marketing research in Chicago, Detroit, and ultimately Atlanta. I worked on a number of large national brands including MacDonald’s, Nestle, Cadillac, Pontiac, and Whirlpool. Since retiring from Earthlink, I have been involved in a number of organizations and clubs in the Atlanta area, and have held leadership positions in the Friends of Smyrna Library, the International Club of Atlanta, and Cobb Photographic Society.

Though I am interested in the arts, including ballet, my main passion is photography. For me photography has two parts that make it an engaging and valuable pursuit. The first part is finding something worth photographing. This involves looking not for objects per se, but having an eye out for combinations of color, form, line, and texture that make an object visually interesting, attractive, and worthy of photographing. 

The second part of photography is creating a print that captures what my mind saw when I took the picture. This involves using various photo processing tools to bring the image to life. Eliminating distracting elements, enhancing or toning down colors, darkening the edges and brightening the central elements of the image, converting the image to black and white, are some of the ways a raw image becomes a photograph. If the processing is successful a good photograph draws you in makes you want to look at it up close and often.

When I am not taking photographs, I am planning trips to take photographs. My next destination is going to be Iceland.