A week later she was hooked. “I couldn’t stop talking about it,” Ruth enthused. “I was just so exhilarated, so pumped!” Her observant husband had no trouble picking her 2006 Christmas gift — a Nikon digital SLR camera and a fine landscape lens. It’s unlikely that he fully realized the extent to which this gift would keep on giving. As she puts it, “Photography allows me to stop time and be captured with the solitude and beauty in front of me.”

Two-and-a-half years later, Stenson swears she still spends 15 hours almost every day working on her photography. Corny or not, Ruth Stenson has developed a relationship with her photography that has given her life new passion and meaning. It has energized her and brought her alive to new possibilities and continuous growth. She convincingly justifies her gratifying addiction with a single statement: “Shooting landscapes is my personal bliss.”

Photo Gratification

Ruth describes herself as “an instant gratification kind of person.” Once she experienced the immediate results of her efforts on the digital display of her camera, she was compelled to learn everything she could as quickly as possible. First she mastered the basics of the camera and photo editing with Photoshop CS3 by taking creative photography courses at St. Lawrence College in Kingston. Then she signed up with professional photographer and instructor Jonathan Sugarman of Sugarman Design in Kingston, studying lighting and learning advanced techniques. She thrived under his personalized tutelage.

An Emotional Filter

Stenson’s photographic specialties are landscapes and portraits. To move from the big picture to the close-up she has to change her technical settings, but she never removes her emotional filter. The underlying passion remains the same. Stenson strives to capture the essence, the emotion of the moment. In her portraits she is looking for the candid, unaffected expression on the child’s face that brings a knowing smile to the parents’ faces. She watches for the fleeting look of pure love and trust that illuminates the bride’s and groom’s faces, and the mix of pride and hope and loss that suffuses those of their parents.

She also has a gift for quirky creativity that produces memorable images. One of her photos of an infant asleep on a stack of fluffy white towels captures the vulnerability and beauty of a newborn as well as anything I have seen. She photographs people in their own homes to better capture the candid, unposed moments of love and fun and interaction that have such emotional power.

She has been known to return more than a dozen times to reshoot the same landscape image, looking for the precise lighting and weather conditions that determine the mood of her composition. Mist, snow, rain, choppy water, sunrise, sunset — each evokes a different emotion, and Stenson knows when she’s captured what she’s after. “It’s like a golfer when she swings; you know immediately when you’ve hit the ‘sweet spot’.”

Two Pairs of Eyes

Holding a viewfinder to your eye doesn’t make you a fine photographer. Each image represents a myriad of choices made in a moment of time. Ruth Stenson looks at the world through two pairs of eyes — her own and her father’s. “He taught me how to see.” Their visits to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton remain vivid in her memory. One of the great satisfactions in her life is that she and her generous husband were able to care for her parents in their final days. She recounts how her father insisted on walking up the long, steep path from the lake to the house after debilitating cancer therapy because “I can’t see” if she drove him down the neighbour’s laneway. She shows me the spectacular view of Wolfe Lake they enjoyed from their living room and confesses to feeding the deer during the winter because it gave her mother such pleasure to watch them.

Raised in the Dundas area, Ruth was given the gorgeous lakeside property near Westport previously owned by her mother’s mother. It is an idyllic setting for a landscape photographer. “The winter shots are absolutely magical,” she says, and her photographs prove it. Her major investments in time and money have moved her to a level I wouldn’t have thought possible in such a condensed timeframe. Her latest purchase was a professional Epson 17-inch-wide ink jet printer, enabling her to control the precise quality of her prints. She does prodigious amounts of research into the selection of equipment and supplies, printing on museum quality fine arts paper with top quality inks.

Judging from her photographs, you would be doing yourself a favour to mark your calendars now to visit her home during the Westport Area Fall Colours Studio Tour on Thanksgiving weekend, October 10-12. She will be participating as Studio 3, and information is already available on the website. The map will also guide you to her home studio if you would like to meet with her to commission photographs of your children, your wedding, or to immortalize other events or scenes that you or your family will treasure some day. One client has commissioned a four-seasons shoot of their log house in the 1000 Islands. You can reach Ruth Stenson by phone at 273-6141 or by email. Her “official” website will soon be available at www.ruthstensonphotography.ca. In the meantime, you can sample her emotionally evocative images at www.flickr.com/photos/stenson5.