Willa Stein is a local fine arts and editorial photographer who is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Willa was fortunate enough to learn from a compassionate teacher while attending High School in Easton Pennsylvania. It was in her junior year when she was awarded a scholarship from The Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, a study in photography. Willa fell in love with black & white photography and learned the vanishing art of hand tinting photographs, which she has been mastering for the past twenty-eight years. Working in and out of darkrooms for a majority of this time Willa became an accomplished black & white printer and used this talent to produce many silver gelatin archival prints to be handed down as family heirlooms for generations to come.
Today, Willa works with state of the art archival printers producing Giclee high quality digital photographs. "The birth of the digital camera did a lot of good and bad to the world of photography. Getting immediate gratification and being able to shoot a lot more images is no doubt a great plus. However, the digital age, for lack of a better word, has cheapened the world of photography. So few folks consider the fine-art archival photograph anymore. The digital world has made modern day photography so easy, so user friendly that few and far between will ever cherish fine prints from yester year.” These days, most folk show family photos through their phone, Stein hopes to turn this concept around and bring back the demand for quality digital prints to be handed down in time.
Through it all, Willa has continued to turn her camera on and produced some of the most appealing and whimsical photographs. Never giving up on her passion to create, Willa Stein has produced a body of images that stay with you long after your eyes have viewed them. Her imagination, use of pattern and texture gives the viewer more than a decorative image to look at, she gives the on-looker another way of seeing the world around us. Willa Stein resides in a beautiful historic neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina; she continues to shoot family portraits while continuing her education in graphic design. She is hoping to find many avenues to keep her photographic talents alive and well while adding new related services to her established graphics business.
