Jim Ostroff

I received a Brownie box camera for my tenth birthday and have been observing the world “a lil’ bit different” ever since. No matter that I moved on to SLRs, the need to look though a viewfinder compels me to focus the lens and my mind on the image, be it a dazzling landscape, a flower or face. Rather than just CLICK and take a picture, I seek to find the essential elements that will tell a story, convey emotion, incite people to think. This M.O. is informed by my career over 46 years as journalist. The lot of us are storytellers at heart. The four accompanying pictures each have a title, because we are asked to provide them. More important is what the images evoke in your mind, your thoughts.

Electronic images

Ostroff image 1 Tranquility Base
Day trippers race to beat the setting sun on Puget Sound
Ostroff image 2 Eye of the Beholder
A phantasmagorical visage of Seattle’s Space Needle
The Space Needle, an iconic American structure hailing from to the ’62 World’s Fair, has been photographed thousands of times; of late, as the backdrop for countless selfies. Scouting around the adjacent Chihuly Glass Museum and Garden, I was captivated by decorative glass orbs and their reflective abilities. Here, I captured my wife and I as elements of a dreamlike landscape.
Ostroff image 3 A Bit O’ Heaven
Eons after vulcanism sculpted the British Isles, floral eruptions decorate the Scottish Moors
Scotland’s Isle of Skye is magical by any measure. The fast-changing weather lights the Moors in a candescent array of hues. In a wink, brilliant sunshine is overtaken by a dense mist and low clouds. The “atmospherics” produce myriad, oft-changing images. Perchance, this gave rise to long ago inhabitants’ belief the Moors are the homestead of the Wee People, leprechauns, who work their magic on the landscape and occasionally, grant humans’ wishes. My wife and I got a wee bit o’ taste of this magic when a drab landscape morphed into a color spectacular. The wished-for rainbow failed to materialize—for an hour. Maybe, the Wee People have their own time window to make wishes come true?
Ostroff image 4 A Prague State of Mind
Dreamscape on a rainy day in the Czech capital
The Communist-era Prague has transformed following the Velvet Revolution into a bustling, pulsating urban melange of the ancient and spanking new. Perhaps inspired by the century-ago works of the Futurist artists, I sought to capture the city’s dynamism, a rainy day notwithstanding. Thanks to a bit of serendipity, I came upon a car bathed in the perfect light to mirror the streetscape as a distorted mashup. The result in no way compares with “The Hand of Man”, but there is the signature of picture maker’s hand.