Jean H. Herskovits is featured in our fifth installment of our guest post series. Jean uses a Nikon D90 camera and also is an avid user of his mobile phone a Samsung Galaxy S1 for images.

My name is Jean and I was born in Bucharest, Romania.  In 1969 my family moved from Romania to Paris, France when I was six years old..

I still speak Romanian and have recently spent six years in Bucharest as an expat, from 2004 to 2010.  You can say I have two cultures, but the French one is predominant.

I bought my first camera which was a second-hand Olympus OM-1 with my first wages from a summer job, in 1985 or 86, and started shooting regularly.

If you are from a generation old enough to remember these silver paper times, you will probably also remember that B&W was way cheaper than color photography.  So that’s how I started.

In my opinion, beauty in photography (as in all graphic arts) has to do with balance.  Balance between shapes, colors, shadows, light and dark areas… Sometimes beauty comes from the deliberate absence of balance, but even then, balance is the keyword.

To me, the following picture has quite a good balance of shades and shapes.
I call it  “Dim Swing”

More of my images can be seen at – Jean.H.Herskovits