Remembering Florida Nature Photographer and Graphic Designer, Linda King

By Tom Tracy

In the Fall of 2007 I was schlumped over in a hospital bed in Seville with food poisoning after days of eating my way across Spain, facing the likelihood of not recovering in time to shoot one or two upcoming weddings back home.

It's still hard to believe that I was allowed to do so, but the Spanish hospital staff let me plop down at the nursing station computers — intravenous drip in tow — to email a few emergency messages to friends in Florida who would take over my weddings. One of those was Linda King, a member of the Professional Photography Guild of the Palm Beaches.

A much-loved local photographer and digital imaging/Photoshop technician, Linda wasn’t particularly associated with wedding photography, nor was she crazy about the physical nature of wedding jobs, but I had seen her solid work and dedication to excellence, and I predicted she would be one of the very best persons I could possibly enlist.



It was a relief when she agreed to step in, and when the weddings were over, she had not only processed all her own images from Raw to Jpegs, she had super-edited quite of few images into finished portraits and works of art saved as Tiffs and big PSD layered files. It was so much extra data that I was concerned it was more than I could handle.





Obviously it was a good problem to have, and many of her images graced the final wedding albums I made for those clients, who loved the work.






Over the years, I got to know Linda, her deep knowledge of graphic design and photo editing software, as well as her guitar-playing husband Bruce, and their family and friends. We shared a few holiday meals and I even went to an Easter service with them on one occasion.

This week, we learned of Linda King’s premature passing after a battle with cancer, an illness which only seemed to impel her to travel more and double down on her own photographic development and output in recent years.

For my part, I still relish her teaching me some tricks, including the ‘Photoshop LAB Color’ correction method which was a kind of secret recipe technique she clearly perfected but that I still tinker with daily in my own way. Stay tuned to the blog for an upcoming article about this technique.

Linda will be sorely missed by many in Florida’s photographic community, especially those in the art landscape, nature and bird photography circles, where she had been hitting her stride and expanding into the realms of digital art photography and textures.

For a look at some of her nature work at ‘Fine Art America,’ see: http://fineartamerica.com/art/linda+king



Tom Tracy is a writer, photojournalist and event photographer based in West Palm Beach. His website is www.TomTracy.com