Woodland Photography

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Our story of a FAMILY LEGACY

This legacy dates back decades spanning three generations. Both of my parents Bud and Dorothy Hesse were photographers and both of their parents were into photography. My parents started and successfully ran The Art Center Studio in Hartington Nebraska back in the 60’s winning awards such as best wedding album of the year along with numerous other recognition's. In 1979 they relocated to Bentonville where they opened a new studio changing the name to Woodland Photography. They parents taught me the trade along with mentoring by the very best photographers in America. Wow have times changed. Kids these days probably don’t even know terms such as developing, negatives, transparencies, or exposure let along a light meter or how to use one. Starting out in the black and white dark room developing film and using an enlarger to expose the photographs with light then run them through the developer, stop bath and fixer chemicals makes me appreciate digital and not having to be exposed to those toxins. Boy we went through a lot of work just to get a photograph on paper. When I started out in photography there was no such thing as Photoshop and digital retouching or digital anything. To enhance a photograph was a BIG deal. My mother taught me one way was to retouch the negative by hand using back lit table, a lighted magnifying glass and tiny tiny brushes the size of just a few hairs dabbed in the tiniest bit of perfectly matched color dies. Another way we used to enhance photos was to spray them with a flat retouching lacquer spray so photo retouching colored pencils could be applied or linseed oil so paints could be brushed on to colorize or retouch them. Again WOW. The cameras were big bulky and heavy. When you would load your medium format camera with either 10 or 20 exposures of film very shot counted so you get trained to make sure your lighting, exposure, composition, poses and expressions are perfect every time. These important factors are still very relevant and used by me today. Back then it was very important because very shot cost you money. This trains you to be a well rounded PROFESSIONAL photographer especially after shooting hundreds of weddings and thousands upon thousands of successful sessions of all kinds the most memorable of which was when we had lanky monkey that was jumping completely across our camera room. I have herd stories of lens caps not removed from the lens, what a nightmare that would be to see all your prints blank, fortunately we never allowed that to happen, makes you appreciate instant playback, then you would send the film off to a lab for developing and wait in anticipation hoping all your settings were correct. Talk about stressful especially after shooting a wedding where you can’t jut go back and redo it. Brides really don’t like that. Now days a professional photographer has to be a genius at marketing, social media, web sites, a whole slew of computer programs and public relations along with sales and presentation. Many times I hear of people wanting to get getting into photography professionally and they want to know what it takes. Many seem to think you just go around and click click click but that’s not the case. I tell them realistically that shooting only encompasses of about 5% of your time. The rest is spent on a whole bunch of other things. Any way I just wanted to share with you where Woodland originated, what it took to get here and how far it has come today.

To see some of my work please visit woodlandphotography.com