about ken hathaway
As the saying goes, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder’, which is how I see my photography. I look for the beauty in nature and envision how to capture it on film (or nowadays on a sensor). My photography is taken to inspire my own love of life and I hope you enjoy some of it.
Photography has always been my passion (after my wife and family of course!). My father had still and movie cameras in the house when I was growing up in the 70’s. I gravitated to the still format and in High School became the yearbook photographer using whatever camera was available at the time, usually a cheap manual film SLR. I learned the tricks of the trade while taking pictures of my friends and classmates throughout my senior year at Colchester High School in Vermont.
While in the Vermont Army National Guard for 21 years I took hundreds of rolls of film (I still have most of the negatives) of our unit’s training and my fellow Guardsmen. I liked shooting in Black & White back then as I felt it gave better tones and depicted an environment more suited to practicing our drills in the backwoods of upstate Vermont.
I laid the camera down in the late 80’s and 90’s except for the Guards as it was expensive to do then and my focus was raising my family and providing for them. We took the occasional roll of film when on vacation or at the beach but I did not look for the artistic or drama of nature at that time, too bad as it wasted 15 years of opportunity in New England. When my two oldest girls enrolled in college and we moved to California for work in the mid 2000’s and I saw the beauty of the Sierra’s and Yosemite, I knew I had to get back to my passion as it was beckoning me.
Photography is considered an art, but to me is just plain fun. I enjoy driving around home or venturing ‘further into the woods’ around New England to find how Mother Nature is posing today. Since the best time to take pictures is in the early morning or early evening we decided to buy an RV and now can be closer to the spots I desire to be instead of shooting in the harsh midday sunlight (although that time can be good too if the sun is not forcing its way onto the canvas in a bad way). My wife and I enjoy the camping too so that is an added bonus!
Another fun thing to do with photography is take pictures of people in costume in front of a green screen and put an appropriate background behind them. This only became possible with the advent of the digital revolution; prior to that you had to set up elaborate sets for any kind of synergy to the subject. Each Halloween at work I set up a screen and take my friends and co-workers and then throw a cool background and then display them for everyone to see. When we take them down, they go home with the pictures and smiles.
For the past 5 years, my wife and I (and sometimes a couple friends) have been lucky to take family portraits at the Keene Community Kitchen in late November to have them back to the clients before Christmas. We have met some very wonderful people in the process. We have taken over 125 free family portraits and they think we do it for them when actually we do it because it gives us so much fun and fulfillment to see their smiles in person and later on the photos.
I hope you enjoy my pictures and you see some of the beauty that I saw when I pressed the shutter. Thank you for looking at my site.
