Craig Callan

Craig Callan

Craig graduated from Farmingdale State University with a degree in Photo Technology in 1973.
From '73 to '78, he was a Photographic Quality Control Supervisor for Berkey Photo on the Lower East side of Manhattan. Among other responsibilities, he managed technical aspects of Kodachrome processing for slides and movie film.

In 1978, he started working for Colenta America Corporation, manufacturer of photo processing equipment. The company built both custom designed processors for clients such as National Geographic, Time/Life, Eastman Kodak, NASA, and the White House Photo Lab, as well as the more popular mini-labs. He specialized in solving complex photographic problems and in training operators to produce high quality images.
As part of Colenta's extensive export market he installed labs and trained operators in the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and Jordan. He also designed factories and trained staff to assemble Colenta processors in Mexico and China.

As part of Colenta's growing cooperation with China, Craig was promoted to Communications Director in 1985. In order to surmount language difficulties, he used the desktop publishing software introduced for the Mac to create graphically centered manuals. As part of this, he used Digital Darkroom, the first retouching software available for the Mac. When Photoshop 1.0 was introduced in 1990, Craig was an eager early adopter.

When Craig moved to Washington, D.C. in 1991, he parlayed his desktop publishing and photography experience into a series of jobs with increasing responsibilities in the Graphic Arts Industry. One of the best was as a Mac Retoucher for Lanman Progressive, a high end "trade shop" which specialized in preparing color pages for major magazines and books. Once again, Nat Geo was one of his clients, and they supplied one of the most memorable instructions ever: "Sharpen Lion's Teeth"

In November 1999, Craig was the Prepress Manager for a division of the Washington Post that printed 40 community newspapers, when he was asked to assume the role of Director of Technology and oversee the company's Y2K response. He remained in that position for the next five years, before taking a buyout and working as the Network Manager for a software company until retiring in 2019.

He maintains his interest in photography and Photoshop. He says "Teaching photographers about Photoshop is like teaching five year olds about ice cream. It's messy at first, but they soon get the hang of it."
Craig is looking forward to working on his personal development goals during retirement
• To improve his photography and Photoshop skills.
• To become a cantankerous old coot.

You can see my work on: CraigCallan.com