Mike Dooley Photography Featured in Shutterbug Magazine
Big thank you to the folks at Shutterbug Magazine. In the March 2014 issue, Joe Farace featured my work in the Web Profiles section, and the kind words he had to say about it still catch me off guard.
My photography has been a journey, full of exploration and more than a few bad photos along the way. It started on Friday, May 16, 2008, when my wife gave me a DSLR for our wedding anniversary — something fun for myself, not tied to work or family stuff. We went out the next day and spent the whole day exploring Rhode Island, taking photographs along the way. And boy, were those photographs awful. I mean genuinely terrible, some of the worst you’ve ever seen. But it was a great day, and the first of what became our regular weekend adventures. I’ve been trying to get better ever since — hard to imagine that stop on the journey would lead to a magazine feature.
Here’s the text of the article, since it hadn’t made it onto the Shutterbug website at the time:
Mike Dooley is a Rhode Island-based photographer whose cleanly designed website uses a blog-like format to display his images in a straightforward manner, allowing you to appreciate the subtlety and complexity of a palette covering many genres. Dooley’s landscape photographs eschew the dramatic to produce graceful images such as “Trees on the Hill” but he turns it up to 11 with photographs like “Sunflowers Under Stormy Sky” that employ the Dooley touch, making you want to stop and count each of the hundreds (thousands!) of sunflowers so you can immerse yourself in the scene for as long as possible. His night photography focuses mainly on industrial subjects, yet images such as “Milky Way on Cape Cod” include a tiny building in the background that adds a minuscule detail, bringing the entire image full circle.
In Places & Things, Dooley takes us on a journey from the beautifully realized detail of the “USS Lionfish Torpedo Room” to the juxtaposition of HDR and photojournalism in “Iggy’s Doughboys and Chowder house.” Dooley is clearly comfortable photographing people, as can be seen in a gallery that features everything from traditional headshots and pictures of babies to a series of classically elegant portraits of ballerinas that knocked my socks off. Before leaving the site, stop and peruse Mike Dooley’s blog, which features images of New England along with text illuminating his thought process when making these amazing images.
My favorite part is where he says I “turn it up to 11 with photographs like ‘Sunflowers Under Stormy Sky’.” Still can’t get over that one.
The Milky Way shot he mentioned is one I still love — you can read the full story behind it: Behind the Photograph: Milky Way Over Station Race Point. And if you want a print of it for your own wall, it’s available here: Milky Way on Cape Cod, fine art print.