Randy Bacon Photography expanding

Photographer Randy Bacon is going from close-up to wide angle.

Randy Bacon Photography at 320 Park Central West is expanding east by an additional 1,300 square feet. The additional space will be used "pretty much exclusively for shooting," Bacon said.

The space is "going to allow me more flexibility as far as backdrop usage" and will allow him "to get more complex with the lighting."

He plans to maximize his existing space as an art gallery and for exhibition purposes, he added.

Bacon and his wife Shannon have operated from their Park Central location since August 2000. Their shop's ground floor serves as a shooting location, office and display area where the work of Bacon and other photographers/artists is shown.

In the basement is a darkroom and a venue called the Gallery of the Modern, formerly known as the Boiler Room Gallery.

It was "the old buildings and the metropolitan feel of downtown" that first enticed Bacon to set up shop on Park Central West, he said. The area is complementary to his particular style of photography. "I just didn't feel like there was any other place that would represent it."

It's not bricks-and-mortar that has been the focus for Bacon's viewfinder for more than 25 years, however. "No matter if I'm shooting just for an individual or a commercial job, I pretty much specialize in the human work," he said.

Shannon Bacon is "responsible for marketing and everything other than taking photographs." She's also committed to showing the work of local artists at their studio and participating as a First Friday artwork venue the first weekend of each month.

Bacon said she considers providing fine art work for clients to be the studio's primary aim. Longer range goals include assembling a publishable portfolio of her husband's work. "We do have goals and plans of actually doing a book and for him to be doing more work on a nationwide basis," she said. The company has a Web site at www.randybacon.com.

When shooting photos, Bacon uses a medium format camera, specifically a Mamiya RZ67, which "yields a negative about four to five times larger than a 35 millimeter negative," he said. The result, he said, is better detail and tone, and enlargements can be produced without showing the grain.

Bacon prefers black-and-white to color photography, but he is hard pressed to define its specific aesthetic appeal. "I can't quite figure it out except, you know, I think it makes people slow down," he said.

Color photos can be skipped by rather quickly, he added, "whereas black-and-white slows you down, and then you start noticing the subtleties of the composition and the lighting and also the emotion of the shot."

Bacon said the degree in psychology he received at South-west Missouri State University in 1983 was some "of the best art training I could have got," in terms of connecting with his subjects.