Mike Baroli
Three years ago I wrote a series of articles about the people and events that changed me as a photographer. Mike is the first on the list.
In August 1984, some low life scum scum kicked down our back door, ransacked our house, and stole several things, including my camera. As others have said who have been through this kind of thing, there is a terrible sense of violation at having someone go through your house. As for the belongings that they took, it wasn’t the stolen camera that had me so upset. The insurance money would replace it. It was the Colorado vacation photos inside the camera. Like our daughter who had just caught her first brown trout. Or our three children in the jail in the famous, old Jackson Hotel in Poncha Springs.
Insurance money in hand, I went to my favorite local camera store. Mike was standing behind the counter and he sold me a camera and lens.
The camera and lens Mike sold me, a Canon F-1N camera and 50mm f/1.4 lens.
After that, every time I came in to the camera store to pick up a roll of slide film, he went through my photos. He made suggestions for improving my work. He had me buy the most important photography books. He told me which photo magazines I should subscribe to. When a famous photographer I had never heard of came to town, Mike sent me to the seminar.
Mike gets most of the credit for changing me from an occasional snap-shooter to a photographer.
When I wrote the article about him three years ago, the only photo I could find online was the tiny, slightly blurry photo at the top of this article. I tried various kinds of software to make it bigger but none of them could create a bigger image that looked good enough to use.
Mike Baroli
Today I went back to that series of articles. When I looked at the tiny photo at the top of the article about Mike, the light came on: Topaz Gigapixel AI software! I used the Topaz software to make a bigger and acceptable looking photo of Mike to put at the top of my article.
The article: