Dennis Ariza’s “Hummingbird,” 16 by 20 inches, mounted on canvas. (Contributed photograph/ Dennis Ariza)

Photographers speak about “capturing light,” the best way the legendary Ansel Adams did in his celebrated photographs of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Fairfield photographer Dennis Ariza will get it.

“To me, capturing light means capturing everything,” stated Ariza, an award-winning photographer who, as president of the Fairfield-Suisun City Visual Arts Association, organized the group’s most up-to-date present, “Choices,” on the Solano Town Center Gallery.

The Fairfield mall present — which incorporates not solely a dozen or so of Ariza’s wildlife and panorama photographs but in addition works in lots of different mediums by different artists — continues till Aug. 5. A gallery reception will likely be held from 4 to six p.m. Saturday, when the FSVAA members will change into poets through the reception, studying the poems they’ve written in regards to the paintings within the present. (The gallery is on the second flooring, subsequent to the AT&T retailer.)

To illustrate his concept that pictures is all about mild, or gradations of sunshine, Ariza, 69 and a graduate of Vacaville High School, cites his photograph of Pigeon Point Light Station within the historic park north of Santa Cruz.

He’s snapped photographs of the lighthouse in vivid daylight and likewise in October, as a Pacific storm started to advance shoreward. The monument that was so acquainted to him below clear, sunny skies began appearing new and completely different as grey, moisture-laden clouds rolled overhead and a beam of sunshine, breaking by the clouds, shone down on the lighthouse.

“I use the image on my business card,” Ariza stated throughout a phone interview Tuesday, suggesting, like Adams maybe, his skill to remodel an object or geographic actuality right into a elegant emotional expertise.

Raised in Vacaville, he started his highway to capturing mild in a Will C. Wood High School biology class. His teacher promised to show the scholars how you can take images by a microscope — throughout a time when photographers have been nonetheless utilizing movie, processing photos in chemical options and printing photographs utilizing enlargers — however Ariza recalled spending “the entire semester in the darkroom.”

“I didn’t learn much biology,” he quipped. “The teacher had all this darkroom equipment. He let me borrow an enlarger.” And throughout these months, he stated, he used “these cardboard cameras” to take photos of landscapes and other people in downtown Vacaville. No shock, he spent his summer season trip within the darkroom.

“I ended up doing some yearbook work, too,” in highschool, stated Ariza, including, “I got an A in biology; but, once the teacher told us about the photography, I never attended biology class. I was in the darkroom the entire time.”

Since that point and through the main and ongoing arc of his pictures avocation, which included 36 years working for the Fairfield-Suisun Sewer District, Ariza, now retired, has been making an attempt to speak a want for “people to see what is around us.”

“Not everyone spends time outside like I do,” he stated. “I’ve traveled the West Coast and into Nevada. A lot of people don’t know what’s in the eastern Sierra … Bodie, Death Valley, so I took photos. I try to share that with my family and friends.”

Of course, know-how has remodeled pictures within the final era, “going from film to digital,” Ariza stated. “You used to have to wait five days (if you sent roll film out to be processed and printed). Now you can see it on the (smartphone or laptop) screen when you take it. I carry two cameras. I take my laptop with me and download the images. It’s instant.”

Professional photographers additionally converse of composition as a manner of seeing and arranging visible components inside their digital camera body, however Ariza, an alumnus of the New York Institute of Photography and Solano Community College, defines it as “finding a featured spot in an image.”

“You can do a large landscape but that landscape has a certain point that you’re attracted to,” he stated. “For example, Yosemite Falls in the distance … I give the viewer a point of view, some key item. There’s got to be a key item to grab your attention.”

His penchant for pictures took a critical flip when he opened a studio, he stated.

“I did weddings and portraits … and I hated it,” recalled Ariza, who’s the FSVAA Gallery present’s “spotlight” artist through the exhibit. “A customer might say, ‘I want this picture retaken because I don’t like my hair.’ I’ve always had an interest in the outdoors, in wildlife and landscape photography. I don’t have to worry about anyone’s hair being out of place.”

Over the years, Ariza’s photographs have earned quite a few awards and appeared in periodicals and on-line, in Outdoor Life journal and at www.PetaPixel.com. A member of the Vacaville Art League, Yolo Arts, he joined the FSVAA in 2013 and has proven his paintings in a number of completely different reveals over time and took part in most of the group’s occasions, amongst them  Art on the Vine, The Crush, and different tremendous artwork and wine festivals.

His photographs have earned first-place awards on the Dixon May Fair, the Solano County Fair and Yolo County Fair. Ariza has donated a photograph known as “The Cross,” taken in Anza-Boreggo Desert State Park, to the KVIE-TV Ch. 6 public sale.

IF YOU GO
What: “Choices,” FSVAA  artwork present
Through Aug. 5
Where: Solano Town Center Gallery,
Solano Town Center,
1508-B Travis Blvd., Fairfield
Cost: Free
Note: Reception from 4 to six p.m. Saturday, with appetizers, drinks, and BackRoad Vines wine