Dan McGarrah grew up near Philadelphia, PA.  At approximately age 10 he received an Instamatic Camera as a present, and he was hooked on photography from the beginning.  Translating the view of an instant into a printed image was his kind of magic.  While in high school McGarrah started using his father’s Kodak Retina rangefinder camera. In 1978 he enrolled at Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, graduating with a B.A. in 1981.  McGarrah did advertising photography till about 2010, then had a carpet cleaning franchise.he has exclusively pursued fine art photography since 2018; primarily abstracting photos via PhotoShop.

Then a 2020 Grand Mal Seizure has left McGarrah with a somewhat amorphous cognizance of the ‘external world’, amplifying a penchant for abstraction. He now creates photo-based abstract artworks by starting with digital photographs he has taken of plants or leaves, McGarrah then brings selected images into PhotoShop where he typically spends hours extensively manipulating them, often spread out over months.