Janis S. Stone - Biography

A native of the Washington, DC area, Janis grew up in suburban Montgomery County where her father was a career photographer with the National Institutes of Health. Her first camera was a Yashica twin-lens reflex, a 120 film camera (6x6 format). She learned the technical aspects of photography under her father's critical guidance, including black and white darkroom procedures. Working with him, she designed a motion picture editing bench in the mid-1960s, the derivatives of which are still in use today at NIH.

Her first 35mm camera was a single-lens reflex Pentax Spotmatic II, which became her mainstay for many years. While continuing to work with color print film, Janis switched to color slide film for most of her work. Missing, however, was the darkroom work she valued and loved. When digital cameras finally became capable of creating images with resolutions equivalent to 35mm film, she switched to digital, keeping her film cameras as backup. The use of image processing software has enabled her to return to the darkroom, albeit in digital form. She shoots most of her work in Camera RAW format to retain maximum flexiblity for post-shoot processing.