ART OF MEDICINE
"Blood Brook"
Black and white photograph
By Daniel McGinley-Smith, M.D.
McGinley-Smith, a resident in dermatology at DHMC, has artistic genes: one of his grandfathers "ran the museum school at the MFA [Museum of Fine Arts] in Boston," and his mother is a visual artist. McGinley-Smith got hooked on photography at age eight when he took a community art course in black-and-white darkroom work. He made the transition from film to digital three years ago but says, "I still miss the darkroom." He's stuck with black and white, however. "I love the simplicity," he explains. "It is the shapes and forms that matter most to me in images. I find color often distracts from the details that I enjoy thinking about and feeling." Nature is his favorite subject; he took the image above in 2005 in Norwich, Vt., at a spot he first visited in 1999 on a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. His avocation, he adds, both "sharpens my eye in the dermatology office and gives me an outlet from my medical work."
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