PHOTOGRAPHER / IMAGE MAKER
"On Indigo2, there is no limitation. With other systems, at some point you're going to bang your head on the performance ceiling."
Photographer/image maker David Chalk is describing his first experience manipulating an image with a computer: "It was like the first time I picked up a camera. At that moment I said to myself, 'this is what I have to do, that is I want to do, this is my vehicle.' I'd tried painting, writing, filmmaking and many other things. But still photography had always been my medium. Then, when I sat down at the computer, it was like being born again."
Chalk, who started his career as a photo-journalist, now uses a Silicon Graphics(R) Indigo2(TM) Extreme workstation and Alias's Power Animator(TM) software to create digital images that resemble surreal dioramas in a museum of the imagination. The images often combine texture map photographs he's taken with 3D forms of his own creation. The result, Chalk says, "both emulates and subverts photographic realities of scale, perspective and matter."
