BIO

After college graduation Sam Merrell had the good fortune to walk into a photo-technician job with Brown University’s NASA-funded Planetary Geology program. In their research work products from the four Mars Viking spacecraft, he learned how computers would revolutionize the commercial photography industry. When he moved to New York in the early 80’s, Merrell found computer graphics minicomputer sales offices and made deals to use their demo systems at night. He mashed up video framegrabs with scans of his 35mm chromes and began selling illustrations for magazine articles, medical ads and package design. During the mid 90's he was teaching digital photo at NYC’s School of Visual Arts, and writing about imaging technology for Photo District News magazine. Promoted to associate editor (and consulting on the side), he presented seminars at PDN's annual photo trade shows and other events around the country; working with photographers, stock agencies and image-intensive companies, Merrell helped the photo trades convert to digital methods. In 2000 he joined with three partners to create the first all-digital stock photo agency, SolusImages. More recently Merrell was a board member of the now-defunct American Society of Picture Professionals; for two years he also served as their executive director and publisher of their Picture Professional magazine. Now retired, Merrell splits his time between New York City and somewhere along the American Intercoastal Waterway (ICW) aboard a Rosborough RF-246 trawler.

About the ATTRACTORS images

In 2011, Merrell began shooting collage photos using Microsoft's Photosynth app on a series of iPhones (a 3GS, a 5S, and a 6S). Each collage contained from three to as many as twenty-three different exposures that were Photosynth-stitched into one; each completed collage was stored in the app as a 3-D point cloud plus a flattened JPEG image. For this project, the flattened versions were post-processed using Snapseed and finished in Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop. Interest in Photosynth withered after Microsoft's initial PR splash, and by 2019 the toolkit was "archived."

Photo copyright (and courtesy of) Susan Rosenberg Jones.