About Me

My interest in photography began in childhood.  My first camera was, believe it or not, a Polaroid "Swinger" camera.  Remember those?  A little white Polaroid camera that took really tiny black and white pictures.  I had a lot of fun with that camera and took a lot of pictures.  Sometime later in life, I don't remember exactly when, I got a Kodak Pocket 10 camera which used the really small 110-size film.  Realizing I really enjoyed taking pictures (they weren't quite "photographs" for me yet), I purchased a Kodak Pocket 60.  This was almost the top-of-the-line 110-size camera from Kodak.  You could manually adjust focus and shutter speed.  That was really fun for me because I could now take pictures in low-light without a flash (now, I was getting closer to taking "photographs").  By the way, I still have the two Kodak Pocket cameras but haven't tried them in years to see if they work.  I know the shutter still works though.  Then, as I became a little more proficient in focusing on the right subject matter and having a better eye for composition, I decided it was time to graduate to a 35mm single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera.  I knew I really wanted to learn all the aspects of taking photographs (I really felt that was now what I was going to be taking, not just pictures) and didn't want to even have any kind of automatic features to fall back on.  With that in mind, along with a rather limited budget, I chose a Nikon FM with a 50mm f1.8 lens.  This camera gave me many years of enjoyment.  I learned so much about the relationship between shutter speed, aperture and focus, not to mention composition.  I read several books on SLR photography and exposed many rolls of film.  Due to a bit of a financial slump, I was regretfully forced to sell that camera, one of only two of the several things I still regret having to give up.  (The other was my Pioneer RT-909 reel-to-reel tape deck.  I still want to get another one some day.)

With the advent of digital, I purchased a Panasonic digital camera which stored the images on a "Super-Disk" the size of a standard 3 1/2-inch floppy disk with the capability of storing 120MB of data.  This camera was pretty much the digital equivalent in quality to the Kodak Pocket 10 but certainly not the equivalent in its size.  It took pictures up to 1.3 Mega-pixels.  Then I decided to go into a bit of a better quality digital so I purchased a Kodak V-550.  This is a 5 Mega-pixel camera which stores the images on a SD card.  This is really a good camera which I still use on occasion because it's pocket-size and it'll take video too.  This camera really put the photography bug back in me and besides, all of what I've done was purely as an amateur photographer.  With that and the recent advancements in digital photography, I decided to begin looking into digital SLRs.  After some searching and comparing, I chose the new Nikon D80, 10.2 Mega-pixel DSLR.  I've found this camera to be probably one of the best cameras I've used, let alone owned.  All of the photos on this site were taken with the D80.

Since I enjoyed photography so much, I decided to take the craft into a more professional mode.  Hence "Cutting Image Photography."  I really love people and pets and enjoy working with them in the studio.  After substantial research on portrait photography, some training and experience and found the style you see here to be the most appealing and fun to do.  The portrait photos you see on this site are a result of that research and training and I believe they speak for themselves.  So it is with great enthusiasm and pleasure, I invite you to let me show you what I can do for your family portraits.  Don't forget the pets, they're part of the family too!

If you like the portraits on my site, please give me a call or email me at ken.pesonen@cuttingimagephoto.com to get an InfoPak or discuss a photo session.  I'm sure you will be extremely pleased!