History: (usually at least slightly dated..)

Twistedsun.net was started about five years ago as a way to mess around with web design and show some of my design work to friends, family and anyone else who may have been interested. Over the years the site has grown from my private showcase into an internationally known web site hosting exclusive desktop images created by myself, John Carey. Both the site itself and the desktop images have been given awards and featured in various places such as Pixelgirlpresents.com and MacHome Magazine.

I have been shooting photos most of my life using whatever camera I could get my hands on. It wasn't until high school that I started to really get into the technical side of things. I started to take design classes and fell in love with the whole idea of graphic design. I spent my summers learning all I could about Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I then began to take photography classes and began getting into using photos as key elements in my design work. The years after I graduated high school I spent doing freelance design work for people around my hometown of Greensboro, NC. I designed quite a few CD covers for local musicians and continued to use photography as a key element in my design style.

It took a few years but I am slowly realizing where my passion really lies and that is within photography. Although I am still an active graphic designer I feel a much deeper connection to photography. I love having the ability to expose the subtleness in the world around me and share these discoveries with others through photos. I had decided to start making some of my photography available as desktops on my website because I liked the idea of having my images used by people around the world in their everyday life. It seems amazing to me that this is possible.


Work:

I have been looking to begin to sell some prints of some of my work for quite some time and hope to get this underway in the near future. When I say prints I mean big 20" x 30" poster size prints.I should also mention that I would like to make it known that I am for hire. I offer some of my photographic work for commercial use in advertising and I am available as a photographer outside of my personal work. I have a good eight years of graphic design work under my belt as well and am always available for freelance design and/ or photography. I am not opposed to any job offers should anyone be interested outside of freelance work.


Misc:

For those of you who are curious about such things I thought that I would reveal a little bit about the inner workings of the site. the site is a modified version of a theme from a website program called RapidWeaver. It is a mac os x app and its making this site a lot easier to update. It's given me a chance to focus more on the content of the site rather than making sure everything is linked together properly and all of the other work it took to keep up an html site.

The single most common question I am asked in emails is what kind of camera I use for my photography. It's a canon 20D and I love it. I do hope to upgrade to a 5D sometime in the coming months but that will take an investment that I don't have at the moment. Canon is my favorite camera manufacturer by far. Other camera makers just have not made anything as solid as what Canon has to offer in my opinion. The lenses that I use at the moment are ones that I bought to replace the kit lens that came with the 20D. One of them is a pretty standard zoom (EF 28-105 f/3,5-4.5 II USM) and the other one is a 50mm prime lens (EF 50mmf/1.4 USM) which I bought for low light situations and it gets more use than the zoom from day to day use which surprised me. One of the reasons I would like to get my hands on a 5D is because of its full frame sensor. The 20D is nice and all but clash a bit with my current lenses. I believe the 50mm is more like 80mm for example.Eventually I would like to get a traditional film camera at some point as well because there really is no comparison to a real film camera when you want un-compromised image quality. Digital cameras sure are getting more and more amazing though. Thats for sure.
Update on the camera stuff, since writing the above entry I have bought a new Canon 5d which is what I shoot with almost exclusively these days I have two lenses a 35mm f1.4L Canon and a 28-105 F3.5-4.5 II USM also by Canon which is a great lens for the price I paid for it. Generally the 35mm stays on the camera 95 percent of the time and will most likely be replaced soon by a 50mm F1.2L when I get the money together for it. I use Canon over other companies simply because I find I like the results much more than what I have seen other camera companies in the digital field. They really have a very solid understanding of how to make a damn good image sensor. Write me with any other questions you may have.

Then there is retouching. I use Adobe Photoshop for color adjustments, croping, resizing, and whatever else I find necessary to get any given image exactly the way I want it. It's simply the best out there. If anyone was looking to get some comperable software for image ediing at a much lower price point I would check out Photoshop Elements. It has some great editing features and most of the small editing I make to my images can be done using this program.

I know that parts of this site don't have the best spelling and grammar, mainly the misc weblog and thats not going to change. That area of the site is not intended to impress anyone. It's just there to share a bit of my other interests. The rest of the site gets edited by a close friend of mine, Val which is a good thing because I am alwas overlooking something.

If you have any other questions please, let me know and I may add the answer to this page.