I have always been a little afraid of photography. Unlike graphic design, photography is a hot medium — you have to think on your feet and it's success is more a product of relationship building than technical expertise. Having worked for years with film and digital files, I know you have to keep abreast of technical developments related to the craft of the medium, but just enough to be able to put it behind you and get on with the business of making pictures.

I started working with Adobe Photoshop sometime around 1990 and Adobe Illustrator a couple of years later. At the time Illustrator was more stable than Pagemaker — at least in my experience — and so I used it for smaller print jobs. I later switched over to QuarkXPress, and abandoned it just as quickly with the introduction of Adobe InDesign around the year 2000.

Inkriver has been my portfolio web site for more than a decade. When I started it I was doing mostly commercial/industrial layouts and photography for print. Today I do more photography and illustration work, for either print or the web. I sometimes sell prints. I build small web sites for a handful of clients. And I still work on jobs intended for print.

Aside from end use, there isn't a lot of difference between work I do for clients and work I do for myself. I hold degrees in Literature and Photography and often they merge in the pictures. I also have a great love of good writing and I sometimes play with the interrelationship between the two (words make pictures in your head; pictures demand explanation in words). I started a section of this site called Casa Diablo a couple of years ago. It centres on fiction for the web — short, short snippets of text supported pictures. Casa Diablo is a work in process. I will see where it goes.

I hope you like what you see here. Feedback is always appreciated.

Paul Saturley
psaturley@inkriver.com