Derek McCabe was born in Yonkers, NY on March 28, 1963. My parents moved shortly after my birth to Rochester, NY – where I attended Jefferson Memorial Elementary School. I grew up as the oldest child, having three younger sisters. Soon the family moved to Ridgefield, CT, where I attended middle school and graduated high school. It was those early high school years that got me interested in graphic design, painting and photography.
Upon graduating from Ridgefield High School in 1981, I pursued higher education in Boston, MA. I enrolled in the cinematography program at Emerson College as a film major with minor in studio photography. These were the days of actually processing film negatives and making prints with chemicals on your hands. After college, I moved to NYC and worked for a few major advertising agencies as an art director. Then came Apple Macintosh. The new graphic design tool to rule them all. I was addicted. Desktop publishing started going color. Adobe created Illustrator, and again I was hooked. Then came PhotoShop. Now it was time to combine the photography skills with a computer.
I got married, had a daughter and moved back to Boston. I started and managed a prepress company located in Woburn, MA. High-end color prepress and image retouching services for Fortune 500 clients. Then came the internet. Time to jump in… dot.com explosion. Huge projects with teams of fifty plus developers. User interface design hit the mainstream. The world was going digital. Then came the first digital cameras. The first generation cameras sucked. They were not as good as a chrome scanned on a drum scanner. Magazine covers were still done with film. It got better. And better. I was a professional web developer and graphic designer — digital photography was just a side hobby. But now with digital, I didn’t have the cost of buying film and the processing costs later on. I could now take two thousand images of a single event! The lenses got better, and more expensive. My media credentials started to roll. I got published in Rolling Stone. My hard drive collection started to get expensive. Maybe I could actually get PAID to take some photos. Time to go pro.
After a few years working as a professional photographer, web designer, creative manager — I am now launching this site to sell limited edition prints. Just the good stuff.
Now I am ready to share some of these moments with the fans. My music photography consists of thousands of images, and I will be adding the “best of” to this website over the next few years — I will add a few images each week. Follow me on Twitter for updates and info about the artists as new images are posted. I am also going to post some of my better landscape photos, as well as some sporting events, cars, trains, plains… don’t stop me now, I am going to post all the good shit!
Post a comment on any image. Send me a message if you want to talk. Enjoy the images. And if you find something that you would like a print, you can order here online or contact me for other arrangements.
Derek McCabe