Welcome to my photo gallery

It is my pleasure to share with you some of my images. Feel free to invite your friends and visit as frequently as you wish. Please also explore other parts of jakubek.net, my internet home, and learn about my family, my work, and my other interests.

My photography focuses on visual abstraction and interplay of color and shape. Color-rich images I create are inspired by art and artistic credo of Wassily Kandinsky, who once said: "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." My photography is frequently guided by my scientific background in photophysics. I am always on a lookout for false perspective effects to create eye-fooling Escheresque images, reflections in curved surfaces to find magic in visually abstracted ordinary scenes, or projected shadows to reveal hidden dimensions. Being married to an avid flower painter, I have also developed interest in nature macro photography.

I was born in Poland and, before arriving to Canada in 1997, have also lived and worked in the USA, Japan, China, and France. I have extensively traveled around the world visiting nearly 60 countries. My travel photos and travel stories have been published in magazines in Poland, the USA, Japan, and Singapore. I have an M.S. degree in physics from the Jagiellonian University (Cracow, Poland) and a Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA). When not creating new images, I work as a scientist at the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa, where I develop fluorescence microscopy methods and techniques and study nanomaterials and biomolecular interactions. Until recently I was also an adjunct professor at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), where for several years I guest lectured on photophysics of nanoarchitectures and metamaterials.

The recent images shown in my web gallery were recorded digitally with Nikon D200, my primary camera for the last several years. Older images, and some of the recent ones as well, were recorded with Minolta 707si SLR using Fuji Provia and Velvia and, in some cases, Agfa Scala and Kodak Gold films and scanned with Nikon Coolscan 4000 at 4000 dpi and 48-bit color depth. A few images were also made with my Nikon Coolpix P&S cameras, the 995 and P2. You can read about the cameras I have used in the past here.

I print my images with Canon photo printers (Pixma Pro-10 and an older S9000) using genuine Canon inks on both genuine Canon papers and other high quality digital fineart papers (Crescent digital, Hahnemühle FineArt, and others). The images are typically framed using acid-free mats (Chalk White Alphamat is my favorite), acid-free foam-core backing, and black anodized aluminum Nielsen frames.

I periodically show my images at local galleries and various community events. In 2004 (May 1-29) I had my first solo exhibition entitled "Point.Click.Wow." at the National Press Club Gallery in Ottawa, Canada. Now, you can review the "Point.Click.Wow." show in my internet gallery. For more info about my other shows please follow the exhibitions link above.

Every year in June, my wife Beata and I, along with other Ottawa east end's artists participating in the Orleans Art Studio Tour, open our studios for visitors. For more info about the tour please see the Orleans Art Studio Tour website.

The New Year's Eve 2011 we spent in New York. Rather than getting squeezed at Times Square, we welcomed arrival of 2011 at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Please click here to view a slideshow of that event's fireworks display.

Please sit back and watch the slide show on this page or go to Gallery (or Old Gallery) to view the images at your own pace. Please visit again as I add new images periodically.