John McCann has always been interested in color. He separated colored salts using chromatography in a high school science-fair project. He synthesized pale-blue and pink isomers of CuCl2 in a freshman independent-research chemistry project at Harvard. He worked for Edwin Land on two-color photography and Retinex Theory during summers at Polaroid. After a degree in Biology 1964, he worked for Land for 20 years; working in, and managing, Polaroid’s Vision Research Lab 1961-1996. Ansel Adams, long-time Polaroid consultant, described the Zone System as: capturing all scene information – “the score”- and transforming it into the desired print – “the performance”. Land and McCann invented algorithms to calculate Adams-like appearance images from luminance arrays in 1971. John and Jon Frankle set up Polaroid’s first digital imaging laboratory in 1975. He developed systems that capture natural scenes, calculate appearances, and write the computed image on media. This process simulates what a painter would do to reproduce a scene. John is a Fellow of the Society of Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T), and Optical Society of America (OSA). He is a past president of IS&T; and the Artists Foundation, Boston; and past-Secretary of the Inter-Society Color Council (charter member of AIC representing the United States). He is the IS&T/OSA-2002 Land Medalist and IS&T 2005 Honorary Member. He continues his research on color vision, photography, and fine art. As well, he is fascinated with the rich histories of photography and all color disciplines.