John Reeve
Bio

I was an 11 year old boy growing up in suburban Toronto when I bought my first camera. It was a Kodak Instamatic. I got it in anticipation of a family vacation to Expo 67 in Montreal. I remember paying $20 at Woolco, a princely sum in those days, at least for a kid whose weekly allowance was 25 cents. I quickly discovered I had an affinity for picture making and, right from the start, I was inclined to try to produce aesthetically pleasing images rather than just take documentary snapshots.

Much as I enjoyed photography, it wasn’t until my university years that I upgraded to more serious equipment. The Instamatic just didn’t cut it during a summer spent working on the Keewatin tundra with the Geological Survey of Canada and I coveted the Canon SLR of a fellow crew member. So before my next season with the GSC on Baffin Island, I bought my first 35 mm SLR, a used Pentax Spotmatic II. Fully featured for its day but devoid of any of the automation of today’s cameras … it even required stop-down metering ... it proved a superb tool for honing the craft of photography and served me well for many years, carrying me into the realm of an advanced amateur.

My career as an analytical geochemist took me to various other parts of the country, initially basing me in Ottawa and seasonally in the Campbellton area of northern New Brunswick before I transferred to Whitehorse in 1982. I immediately fell in love with the Yukon and I have made it my home ever since, fortunately being able to remain even as my career opportunities here dwindled and ultimately evaporated.

Preparing to depart from the “Gill Hotel” at Mara Lake in the Okanagan, August 2006 Photo Taken by Victor Gill

Joining the Whitehorse Photography Club shortly after my arrival in town was a great boon to my photographic skills and artistry. It was a dynamic organization in those days with rich cross-fertilization of knowledge, ideas and techniques amongst the many members and it provided inspiration, encouragement and critical guidance. Under the auspices of the Yukon Photographic Art Society, we have had numerous workshops with pre-eminent photographers including Courtney Milne, Freeman Patterson, Darwin Wiggett and Maria Zorn. (I apologize to the many others I have left out, but these are a few who particularly influenced and inspired my own photography.) My photography blossomed to a creative climax in the 1980’s and I accumulated a collection of Pentax 35 mm equipment that included LX, MX and ME Super cameras.

For the past decade now, I live in a remote location just outside Whitehorse where the Yukon wilderness literally stretches from my doorstep, yet I am serviced with the “necessities” of modern life including high speed internet to help keep me in sync with the (un?)real world. My life is a mix of back-to-basics simplicity and electronic complexity, including such activities as gardening, woodcutting, hiking, tent camping, motorcycling and, of course, photography as well as exploration of this huge digital universe accessed through the computer.

I started dabbling in digital image editing in 2000, using a film scanner to digitize my slides, and I gradually advanced my skills in Photoshop and associated software (along with my general computer knowledge) over the ensuing years without any real formal training. In 2004, I finally bought a digital camera, an advanced compact, Konica Minolta Dimage A2. I didn’t intend this to replace my 35 mm SLR’s but I quickly became addicted to the instant feedback that digital provides and I just can’t motivate myself to shoot film anymore. The A2 is very competent and provides almost as much creative control as an SLR.  However, the compact sensor format is a bit limiting for some of the types of photos I used to like to shoot so I began 2008 with the purchase of a Pentax K10D digital SLR. My old Pentax lenses work with it but have limitations as I never upgraded my film cameras into the era of autofocus and other advanced electronic features, so I also bought some new lenses. New and renewed creative possibilities unfold and I am delighted to find that photography still excites me.

Site Mission

This is my first adventure in the creation of content for the web and, as I become more familiar and comfortable in the medium, my scope may broaden and progress. Right now, the purpose of this site is simply to serve as a venue for showcasing my photography and sharing my photos with friends, family and anyone who is interested. Whatever else may evolve, I expect this will remain a central focus for as long as I maintain the site.

Report Problems with this Site

I want to try to make this website as compatible as possible with different browsers and configurations. Please let me know if you experience any problems viewing the site, including glitches with the way pages display. Include information about your set-up, in particular your browser and its version, your operating system and the resolution setting of your monitor. If you could attach a screen capture showing the problem that might be especially helpful. E-mail problem report.

Known Issues:
—This site has been optimized for viewing with a monitor resolution of 1280 x 1024 or 1024 x 768 with no sidebar. If you use a lower resolution, some of the images will not be entirely visible at once and some sideways scrolling will be necessary; on framed pages, such as this one, you can drag the unmaximized window to move the left frame off monitor and expand to the right to view the full width of text. The flash galleries will work fine with resolutions down to 800 x 600. For best viewing on monitors at less than 1280 x 1024, close all unnecessary toolbars, sidebars, etcetera in your browser or try pressing F11 to view full screen.
—Many of the pages on this site, including this one, use frames. If your browser does not support frames, ... you probably aren’t reading this. Anyway, if you can navigate to the flash galleries they will work fine.
—Photographic images contain a lot of data and require considerable bandwidth to download. Reducing this requirement involves compromises to image quality and size. Because I approach photography as an art, I have biased the balance towards quality. I apologize to those of you with slow internet connections who may find these pages slow to load, especially the galleries. I had dial-up service recently enough to understand your pain and I do not make this choice lightly. Even with a fast connection, the server may limit bandwidth enough that it can take a few minutes to load all the images in a flash gallery
—The flash galleries and magnified Feature Photos pages require that scripting be enabled in your browser. Active content must be allowed in Internet Explorer. Other pages contain scripts that generally are not required except in special circumstances.

I recommend the Firefox browser, but these pages also have tested satisfactorily in current/recent versions of Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome and Safari (only tested in Windows).

There’s my new sunroom, now where’s the sun?