Flickr Creative Showcase

Close-Up Joel Tjintjelaar's

Like many of Flickr's most talented members, Joel Tjintjelaar didn't take his photography seriously until recently. "I always admired black and white, but I only did some happy snapping," says the Dutch information-technology project manager. "Then I thought, 'Hey, why not produce these beautiful images myself?'"

That makes Tjintjelaar's work sound easier than it is. "The first time a subject catches my attention, it's rare that I can shoot it the way I see it in my mind," he explains. "So I go back again and again until everything is perfect - light, weather, the tides. I've shot a few piers and breakwaters along the Dutch coast maybe a thousand times, from all angles and in all weather conditions, in broad daylight and in the dark of night, at high tide and low tide. And still I think I'm missing that one special shot that captures the essence of that pier. My wife hates it because I take her with me when she'd rather go shopping." That's understandable, given the photographer's love of long exposures. "A long-exposure shoot of mine usually takes two or three hours," he says. "If I'm really lucky, I'll get five good frames."

Despite that attention to capture, Tjintjelaar does plenty of image editing to make the world look the way he sees it. "It's mostly just heavy dodging and burning, but it amounts to 80 percent of the time I put into a photograph," he says. "Like Ansel Adams said, dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. But steps sometimes turn out to be big leaps." View his official site here. AP

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