Ronald Gans Photography

The Galleries

In 1999 I started to get seriously interested in photography. Naturally beginning with 35mm color film, the most accessible format, my preference quickly became black and white and more formal imagery. After purchasing my first Pentax67 and learning how to do my own prints and negatives, I got to work learning all about this field.

Later on, I acquired a 1959 Deardorff 8x10 field camera, for which I use Tri-X 320 (that is to say, the negatives are 8"x10"). And more recently, I acquired a Canon 5D-Mark II professional digital camera with a couple of "L" lenses.

While I used to do all my production in a darkroom, lately, I've settled on an Epson 3800 printer and now I scan in all my negatives and manipulate them in Photoshop CS3.

Since the mid-1980s, I've been a computer programmer. But before that, in graduate school at Kansas University, my major was Chinese language, history and philosophy (M.A.). After moving to New York City, I worked at various jobs, among them an interpreter for an acupuncturist, private detective (for two days), an editor for TheaterWeek, and later, for several years as a contract negotiator in China for an English trading company. At one point, albeit briefly, I was fluent enough in Chinese that in China people often thought I worked for the Liaison Office (the precursor to our embassy).

Eventually, I returned to graduate school at Columbia University (East Asian Languages and Cultures), to continue studying Chinese History and Philosophy, mainly Neo-Confucianism during the mid-Ming period. Along the way, I picked up computer programming, wrote some popular shareware programs, such as Xword, a widely used file format conversion program which PC Magazine picked as the best file format converter in 1986. The next year I left school to become a programmer for real, first for Ashton-Tate (the owner of dBase), and later on for companies such as Logitech and Chemical (now Chase) Bank, and AXA.

I still program for my own amusement and have created a symmetric encryption program (Handyman with Andromeda), which I am writing up for consideration as a successor to the current standard AES(Rijndeal).

More recently, I got my Real Estate Sales license for New York and joined Bellmarc Realty, so if you're interested in buying or selling or renting in New York City, I would greatly appreciate an email.

Amargosa Hotel, Death Valley, California

All images on this web site are Copyright © 2002-2010 Ronald Gans. All rights reserved. All materials are protected under the United States and international copyright laws and treaties which provide substantial penalties for infringement. No image may be reproduced or manipulated in any manner apart from viewing this web site without the prior written permission of the photographer. All photographs herein are the property of the photographer.