Ledyard Gallery Opening Reception: "The Brout Orchids"

 

Bernard Trumpower is a Professor of Biochemistry at Dartmouth Medical School. He began photographing as a hobby 45 years ago, when he was a graduate student at St. Louis University. At that time, and later at Cornell University where he was a post-doctoral fellow, he photographed with a Nikon F film camera, using only black and white film, and developed his photographs in a university dark room. He photographed sports car races in St. Louis County for Competition Press, and his photographs of the St. Louis slums were published in Environment magazine. A photograph of a feral black cat that was irritating him by foraging in his garbage can won first prize in a St. Louis Post Dispatch photography contest. Today he photographs with a Nikon digital single lens reflex camera, although he occasionally loads a roll of film into his Nikon F and takes it photographing for nostalgic reasons.

 

The Brout Orchids are a gift to Dartmouth from Alan P. Brout, Dartmouth class of 1951. His donation of nearly 1000 plants represents over 30 years of collecting and caring. Many of the orchids have won prizes in local and regional competition, and the collection is recognized by the American Orchid Society. The Brout Orchid Collection is housed in the greenhouse on the 4th floor of the Life Sciences Complex at the north end of the Dartmouth campus, and is free and open to the public from 8:30 am-4 pm Monday through Friday.

 

The photographs in the exhibit were selected from photographs that Bernard has taken as part of a project in which he plans to photograph all of the approximately 1000 orchids in the Brout Orchid Collection. To date he has taken more than 7000 photographs of approximately 500 orchids. All of the orchids were photographed with a digital single lens reflex camera under available light in the Dartmouth College greenhouse. A handheld reflector was used to direct the light, and in some photographs a black background was held in back of the orchid. In other photographs the background appears black or almost black due to the selective intensity of the light on the orchid created by the handheld reflector. The digital images were then processed on a computer. In some photographs the images were cropped a small amount, and in some it was necessary to remove spots caused by dust on the camera’s image sensor. In no case were imperfections removed from the orchids. You see them as they were. The digital files were then turned over to a specialist printer for printing.