Profile: ELIZABETH CARMEL

STORY BY GREGORY SCOBLETE | PHOTOS BY ELIZABETH CARMELL

March 2008

It’s that sensation of immediate engagement, of immediate immersion, that many people will no doubt feel when looking at the work of Elizabeth Carmel. The California-based landscape and fine art photographer has translated her passion for nature’s majestic scenery into a rewarding photographic career. Carmel describes her mission as drawing out images of the natural world, especially images of the American West, which most people would never have the opportunity to witness, let alone photograph spectacularly.

"When I saw the West, I was hooked."

  Carmel’s eye has always been focused on nature, if not always from behind a viewfinder. Born in Alabama, Elizabeth Carmel was a backpacker from an early age. She earned a degree in environmental science and land-use planning, and worked for the government evaluating the impact of development projects on the environment. While Carmel had always enjoyed photography as a hobby, it was not until the birth of her daughter Abby eight years ago that she took a sustained break from the working world.

  “It was the first chance I had to rediscover my love of photography,” she says. “And it was right at the time when digital was taking off.”

  Her first digital camera was a 3-megapixel (3MP) Nikon Coolpix, graduating to her first “really serious” digital camera, Nikon’s D1x, shortly thereafter. She kept updating as the resolutions improved, jumping over to Canon until finally settling on a medium format back — the 39MP H3D from Hasselblad. (In 2006, she was one of 12 photographers honored with Hasselblad’s Master Photographer award.) Carmel’s emphasis is on printed enlargements and only the high resolution of medium format is up to the task.

  That presents challenges for Carmel as medium format cameras are not traditionally associated with roughing it. And Carmel will rough it. She is not a roadside shooter. She’ll don a backpack and set off into the woods, camping out for days at a time (though never alone).

  “The camera’s been into the repair shop a few times,” she concedes.

Off the Beaten Path

  Trekking out into the wild is integral to what Carmel wants to achieve. “I try to capture images that no one has taken, so that requires getting off the beaten path.” Her goal, she says, is to bring those scenes back to people. She’ll travel trails on foot, on mountain bike or even on skis to get the desired shot.

  The duration and intensity of her trip will largely determine her gear — outside of the H3D and her Gitzo carbon fiber tripods. The longer the hike, the lighter the lenses, she says.

  Sunrise and sunsets are particularly attractive to her, and she’ll rouse herself early to capture the dawn’s early light. Carmel is always looking for unique lighting. She once described it as shooting “at the edges of the day.”

  “For me, it’s all about composition,” Carmel says. “The photo needs depth — something in the foreground, something in the background. Anything to give it dimension.”

  Though she attempts to capture nature, she is not shy about harnessing digital tools to craft the perfect image. In an interview with the American Society of Media Photographers, Carmel remarked that she’s “not a purist” when it comes to processing an image. She says that she will work with an image until she’s satisfied with the color and exposure, and will clone out distracting elements.

  Though she has taken some photography classes, Carmel is largely self-taught. “You just look at a lot of photography, not just landscapes, but all different styles,” she says. “There’s a lot you can do to educate your own eye.”

  Eventually, you’ll emerge out from under these examples to develop your own style. She’ll also attend workshops to hone her Photoshop skills.

  “You don’t learn, then stop,” she adds. “It’s an ongoing process.”

Photography Pays

  Carmel not only caught the digital photography wave, but the digital printing one as well. Harnessing both, she was able to devote herself to photography full time. Indeed, the Carmels — husband and wife — are full-time photographers. Is there an element of healthy competition between the two?

  “It’s been very positive for both of us,” Carmel says. “We each have different styles, different visions.” Her images have more realism, while her husband, Olof, leans toward the abstract. That said, Carmel admits that her husband “does all of the grunt work” of maintaining the studio.

  Carmel’s foray into large format printing began, as she tells it, as something of a lark.

  “We bought an Epson 9500 and I was thinking it would be cool to blow up my pictures. I thought I could do giclée prints to pay for the printer.”

  She trotted a 20x30 framed print over to the local Starbucks and sold it for $200.

  “I quickly became aware we needed to raise our prices,” she says.

  Her work was picked up by a local gallery and sales picked up. Today, Carmel sells her work through multiple galleries, including her own — Carmel Studios, located in a refurbished building in Truckee, Calif.

  “It was nothing I planned,” Carmel recalls. “I was just there at the right time,” she notes, when key digital trends, printing and photography, converged. Now she wants to print in ever larger sizes. The top size she offers online is a 60x40 canvas (for a cool $8,000), but Carmel may “want to get up to 64 inches.”

  Indeed, Carmel is as much entrepreneur as photographer. She attracted considerable attention in 2006 when she self-published a book of her work titled Brilliant Waters: Portraits of Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, and the High Sierra and, in a coup, nabbed Robert Redford to pen the foreword.

  In an interview at the time, Carmel says she had mentioned Redford’s name “in passing” to a friend of a friend of a neighbor of Redford’s who agreed to show him a draft of the 94-page book, which Carmel produced herself on her Epson 9800. Carmel took a call from Redford shortly thereafter, agreeing to write the forward, which she later described as the book’s highlight. It certainly helped sales. Brilliant Waters (plugged by People Magazine) is now in its third printing.

  She was inspired to self-publish when she heard a fellow photographer describe a book of photographs as a “big business card.” She viewed her book as a vehicle to promote limited edition reprints of her photographs, which she would output and sell through her eponymous studio.

  Traversing the world of print isn’t easy, Carmel says. “You have to be an expert in RAW image processing and have good color management.” Having a good eye for color doesn’t hurt either. But it’s also rewarding. “It gives you a lot of creative freedom,” she adds.

  What would Carmel say to aspiring landscape photographers? It’s simple really: Start local.

  “Everyone wants to start out taking the iconic Western shots,” she says, but it’s the local artistic community that can create a groundswell of interest for your work.