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Four or five years ago, Madison photographer David Spear stood in a camera store in Greensboro and harrumphed about the future of photography. He said digital photography would never offer the quality and lasting beauty of the old-fashioned black-and-white photos he shot with film cameras and developed in a dark room.

A man standing nearby turned to Spear, who in the early 1990s won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his photo work.

"Son, you don't know what the hell you are talking about!" declared the man, who was entrenched in digital photography. In a sense, his admonishment contained a compliment when he called Spear, now 72 and a 1960 Guilford College graduate, "son."

One reason for Spear's success as a photographer -- two coffee table photo books and many awards and fellowships -- comes from keeping a mind open to new possibilities. He took the man's declaration seriously and started to look at digital opportunities.

The result: Spear decided to come out of the dark(room) of black-and- white photography into the daylight of digital photography.

"What it did for me was open all the realms of possibilities with photography," he said."Digital won't completely supplant darkroom photography, but it will reign from now on.

Spear's photos are currently on display in a group exhibition at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art in downtown Greensboro. The N.C. Arts Council Artist Fellowship exhibition features the works of 18 visual artists -- including Spear -- selected for the 2008-09 N.C. Arts Council Fellowship Awards. Each artist won grants "to generate the creation of new work," according to Green Hill literature about the exhibit.

Spear's transition to serious digital photography was made possible through the $10,000 grant from the N.C. Arts Council. Spear used his grant to buy Photoshop software (which costs at minimum about $700), a sophisticated printing machine, a scanner that would transfer negatives he shot with Hasselblad film cameras to computers and other equipment needed to fully embrace digital photography.

His photos in the exhibit demonstrate creativity, imagination, mysticism and playfulness that digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop, can offer.

The shift to digital

Using Photoshop, photographers can be more creative once a photograph has been taken. If parts of the image are vivid and other parts bland, the photographer can eliminate the latter by inserting objects such as people, animals, landscapes, etc.

One of the best examples of this by Spear is a photo he took in Madison of an auto graveyard that crushes old cars for scrap.

At the Natural Science Center of Greensboro, Spear photographed big turtles imported from Madagascar. In his studio, behind his house in southern Rockingham County, he manipulated the graveyard and turtle scenes with Photoshop.

As a result, four turtles traveled through cyberspace from the Natural Science Center to invade the junkyard in Rockingham County. One turtle sprawls across the top of a car clutching it like a wrestler. Spear titled it "Turtles' Revenge," and says it was inspired from the many times he has seen smaller turtles splattered by cars on rural highways because no one stopped to help the creature.

Another photo shows a weathered man against a background that looks as if a fierce environmental attack had occurred. Spear photographed the man in Mexico City in the late 1990s. The background he shot at Mount St. Helens, shortly after the volcano shortly after the volcano erupted in Washington state. Spear has spent time on the West Coast where he won a fellowship to the artists' colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, near San Francisco.

This is the "closest thing that photography can come to painting," he says of composite photos produced with PhotoShop.

The transition to digital wasn't easy.

Spear found Photoshop, as many do, confounding in complexity. He did what many people getting on in years do when befuddled by high technology; he turned to teenagers.

Two teens spent several months at Spear's studio helping him to navigate Photos hop before he finally felt secure enough to go solo.

"The program is a monster," he says. "I have been working with it for about a year and half now, and I'm barely into it. It's tremendously profound. I think you could work 15 and 16 years with it and not master it."

Not only was it profound, but profane, too.

"At times I felt like heaving the computer into the river," says Spear referring to the Dan River that flows by Madison.

Capturing the whimsical

People best know Spear for his two books, "Tobacco Road" and "Visible Spirits" and for various exhibits, including one a few years ago at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro.

His works have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill and The Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, among others.

"Tobacco Road" also is the road Spear lives on. He borrowed the name from a novel of the same title by one of his favorite writers, the late Erskine Caldwell.

Spear's book, with text and black and white photos, tells and shows the story of a hardscrabble family, who live, fight, drink and leave periodically for jail from their home at the end of Tobacco Road. The family allowed Spear to spend months photographing them, even though the results aren't always flattering.

His second book, "Visible Spirits," contains black and white photos he shot during 14 trips to and from Mexico by car. One photo has been recycled for the exhibit. It shows a tied eagle seated on a post. A boy was trying to sell the bird.

Spear put the negative through the scanner and into his computer and Photoshop. He dug through his stock of thousands of photos taken through the years and found a background that suited him. He added it to the eagle picture.

He says Photoshop provides purpose for his voluminous files of photos. When he comes across one that's close but not quite good enough, he goes through the files to see "what can I find that will make something out" this photo by adding a colorful sunrise or perhaps a western scene that resembles a moonscape.

Edie Carpenter, director of curatorial and artistic programs at Green Hill Center for N.C. Art, says Spear has moved, at least for now, from the intense, on-site energy required of documentary photography needed for "Tobacco Road" and "Visible Spirits" to the immense freedom that comes with digital photography.

The change also is brave.

The public has come to identify Spear with documentary photography requiring close relationships with subjects. Carpenter says he has now embraced a form of photography that's so different, with "irony, humor and the fantastical." And he has done it without abandoning his previous images, she says. They turn up again in new compositions in his digital work.

Some photo purists oppose Photoshop and the magic it performs. They find it unethical to manipulate photos. Spear, however, says photographers have altered photos since the birth of the medium in the 19th century. During the Civil War, they painted images to make them appear in color. On battlefields, they were known to rearrange bodies to suit the purposes of a photo. "Just dodging and burning photographs in a darkroom is manipulative," Spear says. The same holds true with cropping.

Spear says composite photography doesn't differ greatly from a painter who stands before a canvas adding objects that weren't in the original vision or a writer who doesn't like a sentence and makes it vanish with the touch of a keystroke and writes another.

With bizarre photos, such as the auto graveyard turtles, Spear says he informs viewers the photo has been rigged digitally.

All of this is not to say he has given up conventional film photography or digital photography without manipulation.

His next project will take him and his Canon 5D cameras to China, where he has photographed before. He wants to explore the Chinese countryside ---- ala Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck ---- and photograph ordinary people in the fields and doing other tasks. He hopes to get translation and guide service from his stepson, who is in China studying Mandarin Chinese. Spear plans to play it straight with the Chinese project, although the Canon cameras are 35 mm instead of medium format Hasselblads he used for his two books.

He eventually plans to let his whimsical photo juices bubble again with more Photoshop images.

"In Adobe Photoshop, they have devised a super intellectual program," he says. "And you feel like a moron using it. But I'm getting there, little by little."

Jim Schlosser is a retired News & Record reporter. Contacted him at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net