About Chris C. Crowley
Chris C. Crowley is an artist who uses photography and post processing as her art form. Chris' passion for turning an ordinary snapshot into a work of art gives her the ability to capture more than just an image. She captures the mood and memory of that image.
"I learned to do post processing out of necessity." , she said. "Working with little point and shoot cameras that were all I could afford, I had to learn to make the most of my photos, and quickly discovered the world of manipulating images. Finally, I could recreate with a photo what my mind envisioned when I took the shot! From there it expanded to saving old family photos and facial retouching, to outright art done with photography, using layers, textures, airbrush, and many other editing tools at my disposal. Even those were learned without the use of expensive programs like Photoshop, and now, I can create something out of pretty much nothing!"
Chris has lived in the Daytona Beach, Florida area since 1965. With Florida's abundance of beauty and good weather, there has been no shortage of interesting scenes, flowers, and wildlife for her to draw from, but the brunt of her self education came from learning to post process and retouch self portraits. "The best advice I ever got was when I first started out. A photographer told me to learn to take selfies. He said, 'Your model always knows what you want, is always available, and works for free!' I listened, learned, and applied the same skills to working on scenics, animal shots, and macro flower photography. I learned to think out of the box."
Now, at 59 years of age, Chris is launching out into the genre she so loves, and offers her artistic talents to others to create beauty in their world, and preserve treasured memories. "It's the most rewarding thing I've ever done, and what got me into it was the desire to save my OWN family's photographic record. When I edited my mother's photo at age 24, and took it from about 2 1/2" X 3 1/2" to 8" X 10" , brought up the color and detail, I could see my mother's eyes in a photo clearly for the first time. We had no portraits of her, as she hated having her picture taken. Being able to restore a photo from her youth nearly brought me to tears, and since then, I've worked on hundreds of other family treasures, some which could never be more than a fuzzy art piece, to colorizing black and white shots to make them come alive. Part of it is skill, but much of it is instinct. Only an artist has the ability to fill in the gaps to that degree. I truly love what I'm doing now!"
