I am a Toronto-based photographer, graphic artist, painter and writer. I attended Ontario College of Art and Design for painting and photography and graduated from the University of Western Ontario in the sciences. I currently work as a freelance photographer and designer in the Toronto dance community, and I am also active in the field of Orthomolecular Medicine where I do most of my writing and publishing.
My primary interest is in fine art portraiture and the figure, with photography, paint, conte and pencil as preferred media. You can see a few examples of my drawing and paintings here. The figure-ground gestalt, meaning the structure of the human form as it relates to the randomness in nature, is something I've always been interested in expressing through art.
In shooting dance, I use film for its speed and permanence, which I neg-scan into digital files. Shooting stage performances is a strange sort of genre of photography, I find my perception splits– the broad performance onstage feeds the imagination, but the camera eye must focus tightly on solos or groups of dancers as they shift , dissipate and reform into new positions. Although no photographer can hope to capture the living experience of ballet, but photography has the unique ability to stop the moment and let us savour dance in a new way, as a fixed visual experience. I'll admit, I'm far too enamoured with the post-production digital correction part of photography, but there are so many painterly possibilities which can make a fleeting moment in ballet into art: color balance and interchange, skin tones, contrasts in figure groups, Marley reflections and the compression of stage space to center attention on the groupings of artists. My goal as a photographer is to bring the largeness of dance down to the dimensions of image, a process of balance between the storytelling focus of dancers and the totality of the stage.

–Greg Schilhab
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