Kenzmyth PhotoArt

Ken Smith, Photographer

I spent time in an Air Force base darkroom in Newfoundland when I was in high school.

Though I hadn't taken the photos, I was mesmerized by the process of revealing the images taken by the photographer with whom I worked on the yearbook. 

I didn't start taking photos until I inherited an Exacta VX500 after I got out of the Air Force in 1970. Going to college and raising a family, while working full time as a Respiratory Therapist didn't give me much time for photography in those days. 

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After moving to San Francisco in 1982 and working as a set builder and lighting designer for a couple of years I started a scenery and prop company, Scene 2 with another theater trained designer. In 1985, I bought a Nikon F3HP and got hooked on making images. I built my first darkroom under the stairs in the Victorian flat I shared with my girlfriend, now wife, artist Susan Bercu, in the Mission District.

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In 1991, I left the scenery business to make it on my own as an advertising photographer and struggled to make a living until 1995 when I took a job as the resident digital photographer with the pre-press house, DPI. It was a steep learning curve transitioning from film to digital with the Dicomed(BetterLight) scanning back on a Horseman 4x5, but the inventor, Michael Collette and photographer Steven Johnson spent a long day with me in the studio helping to flatten the curve. Michael re-wrote some of the camera software to accommodate studio shooting which made the transition a bit easier.

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I set up my own studio in 1998 and worked for Old Navy, The Gap, Banana Republic, PC World Magazine, Williams Sonoma, Beverages and More, PC Gaming, and many others over the years. 

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Since the beginning, black and white film imagery had it's grip on me and I spent many weekends shooting on the streets from 1985 to 1994. Sunday evenings were spent processing film, making proof sheets and loading cassettes with fresh Tri-X, Panatomic X, Ilford HP5 and FP4, Agfa APX100. I shot just about every monochrome film available looking for the magic.

I built 6 darkrooms over the years and processed thousands of images. In 1998, I stopped shooting film, gave the darkroom and equipment away and sold all my analog cameras except the 4x5 Horseman and 8x10 Deardorff. I occasionally shot Polaroids with them. In 1999, I bought a Kodak(Canon EOS 1)560c 6MP camera, 5 lenses, 3 Broncolor Power Packs, 4 Heads, 5 soft boxes and numerous other studio equipment items I needed to go from continuous fluorescent lighting needed for the scan back to a strobe based digital capture studio... $65,000.00 worth. The investment was well timed

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In 2003, after the dot com bust, I relocated to San Rafael. I moved the studio twice more and in 2012 closed my last studio on Smith Ranch Road. I had sold pretty much all the studio equipment by the end of 2010. I shot my last commercial assignment in my garage in 2015. 

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But, as you can see, I have not slowed down making images. And now, I have a Mamiya RB67, my wife's old Olympus OM-1 with a 50mm f1.8 lens and a Fuji GW670 or Texas Leica.They are loaded with film. The obsession continues.

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