About

Ren Mar Photography is a fine art photography and photographic services company located near San Luis Obispo, California, named after a contraction of the first and middle names of Renée M. Besta. Ren Mar literally means “reborn by the sea.” For more on the services offered, please refer to the Services page. To learn about Renée, please see the biographical information below.

Renée Besta is deeply drawn to photography as a means of personal artistic expression, being avidly engaged in the art form for over 35 years. She is a fine art photographer and digital inkjet (giclée) printer, digital imaging and graphics instructor, graphic designer, writer, and exhibit producer who resides on the scenic California Central Coast near San Luis Obispo, where she has taught classes in HDR photography, printing, image stylizing, Photoshop, Lightroom and more. Renée is a former Resident Artist at Studios on the Park, a nonprofit open studios art center in the heart of historic downtown Paso Robles with eight studios, 40 working artists, and two galleries.

A very active participant in the local San Luis Obispo County arts community, Renée served as President of the Central Coast Photographic Society, a San Luis Obispo Museum of Art affiliated artist member group, from February 2008 to May 2011. She also served as a Photographic Society Board member for nearly six years. Renée held the position of writer, editor, and designer of the monthly Courier multimedia newsletter for the San Luis Obispo Camera Club from April 2007 through May 2010. She is also the former writer of a monthly photography column, Photo Pulse: The Local Beat, for the Slo Coast Journal, which covered the local arts scene. In March 2010, she was instrumental in launching the Photography Guild of the Paso Robles Art Association, which maintains The Showroom Gallery inside Studios on the Park in downtown Paso Robles.

Renée has garnered numerous awards at the local and national level for her photography and printmaking in juried exhibitions and competitions, and has exhibited and sold her work at multiple fine art venues. She organized and produced several very successful, juried, fine art photography exhibits held on the California Central Coast. Renée has become greatly smitten with UrbEx (urban exploration – the investigation of abandoned and derelict structures) photography and HDR (high dynamic range imaging), which go hand-in-glove.

Her work has been published in several magazines and newspapers, and she has done limited commercial work, photographing artwork for reproduction, shooting special events, and selling stock for use in medical advertising campaigns. Renée is an accomplished fine art digital inkjet (giclée) printmaker, and produces exhibition quality prints for many Central Coast artists and photographers. She teaches digital imaging and printing classes, does private tutoring, and offers photographic post-processing services.

A former biomedical marketing communications professional with a degree in Chemistry, Renée’s scientific training provided her with useful technical skills and served as the left-brain complement to the right-brain artistic process. One of her favorite quotes by famed photographer Richard Avedon sums up her feelings: “If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.”

Please visit her LinkedIn site for more information. You can also follow her on Twitter to see what’s new. Samples of her most recent (October and November 2011) technical writing on HDR photography, post-processing, printing, and color management can be found on the Breathing Color “The Art of Printmaking” blog here (Part One), here (Part Two), and here (Part Three). To view samples of her creative writing, please see the Slo Coast Journal November 2009 or January 2010 Photo Pulse photography columns.