Morgan Hill’s Brenda Renzulli stumbled on her blossoming career
as a travel photographer while celebrating her 25th wedding
anniversary in Tahiti five years ago.
Photo Auction will benefit Hurricane Katrina victims
Morgan Hill’s Brenda Renzulli stumbled on her blossoming career as a travel photographer while celebrating her 25th wedding anniversary in Tahiti five years ago.
Though she only had a rudimentary digital camera on the trip, Renzulli shot numerous photographs of the sights she saw with her husband Carmine.
Her friends and family encouraged her to display her photos at the Morgan Hill Community and Cultural Center after she returned home, and to her surprise, many people wanted to buy her pictures.
“It was like a shot of adrenaline and led to my passion for photography, which I didn’t know I had,” said Renzulli. “It was exhilarating!”
Before her first showing, Renzulli was a stay-at-home mom taking care of her three sons Chris, now 25, Craig, 24, and Jeff, 18. Now she’s ready to embark on a new photography career – traveling with her husband on his business trips to foreign lands such as France, Italy, London and Puerto Rico .
Carmine is vice president of human resources at Sanmina – SCI in San Jose.
Pictures Renzulli took on these trips laid the path to her career. Her first show led to other exhibits, until her career as a travel photographer took off.
Renzulli describes herself as a self-taught photographer. She doesn’t just take regular tourist snapshots of places. She captures scenes often missed by the average tourist.
“I’ll go to the streets and back roads and find unique moments in time, scenes that are extraordinary,” she said.
They could be pictures of landscapes, seascapes, flowers, or candid shots of people.
“I realize I can capture a moment in time that is a vision of what I see that I feel other people can appreciate,” she explained.
Taking the picture is just the beginning of the process for Renzulli.
“The creative process is taking the picture and then working with it to get the exact composition that makes me feel good about it, so that I feel this is a piece of art,” she said.
Renzulli doesn’t need a darkroom to process her photos – she manipulates the digital images using Adobe Photoshop. She will find certain aspects of an image she likes and highlight it using the software.
“This may seem controversial to people, but for me, this is art,” Renzulli commented.
Renzulli said since she embarked on her career, she looks at the world in a different way.
“It’s totally changed the my view of how I look at things in this world,” said Renzulli. “I capture the beauty in small things.”
She could focus on a cluster of grapes and make it art. It could be a picture of a young boy in Chico with a Crawdad, or like the scene she has entitled, “Picking and Grinning,” in which a band, with some members barefoot, was playing on New Orleans’ Abbey Road. She snapped the picture just as a man, sipping on a drink, walked passed the group.
“As I shot that picture, with that man walking across, it just made that scene complete and described New Orleans,” said Renzulli.
Renzulli fell in love with New Orleans while on a trip there to meet her father and brother. Her love of the Big Easy prompted a desire to help with hurricane recovery. She’ll donate the proceeds from an auction of her photographs during the Chamber of Commerce November Business Mixer.
“I waited with everyone for news,” Renzulli said of Hurricane Katrina. “Seeing my pictures and the people in it, I can’t help but wonder if these people survived, if they have a home.”
Rose Meily is the City Editor for the Morgan Hill Times. Reach her at 779-4106 ext. 201 or by e-mail at rm****@*************es.com
