Best Artistic - 2017 in Photographs

Raton Door

I separate myself from the average professional photographer in that I am not concerned about all the obsession with F-stop and acute detail. I am not looking for the perfect feather by feather photograph of an eagle. National Geographic does it better. Nor do I fit in with the digital manipulators who want to insert a wolf into a street scene of downtown Manhattan. 

I first used my photography as my way of avoiding plein aire painting. I would take a picture and go back to the studio and create a painting as I wanted it to be. Then I began realizing I could create that on the computer. And then print it on canvas. Many who buy these works of art believe they are paintings. Digital paintings actually. Art is art and of what importance is it in these days the medium used to achieve it?

Studio Chair

 While some photographers seek accuracy above all I am in search of the fantasy created by light and color. And this year I pushed my previous restrictions by even playing with dawns which are a dance of light and color without my help. But there were so many beautiful dawns this year they got a little boring. So to make the daily 365 day post they begged to be manipulated.

Dawn in Black Lake

I have always manipulated flowers. Poppies especially. But this year I successfully grew a sunflower which posed for me every day it bloomed. In the photo below it became less about the flower but the pose and the colors. It is a painting.

Sunflower in Garden

And in previous years I have done trucks. Fewer this year. Need to go to new territory to find trucks I haven't immortalized. The red truck in the photo below has been a subject of many a photograph but I love this one of just the tail gate.

Ranch Pickup

Another Black Lake Dawn

I snapped the picture of the stain glass fairy in my studio window just as a been there photo but found it was fun to play with and it received more likes on my page than I felt was decent.

Studio Fairy

Orchid Up Close and Personal

And to close an abstract approach to an orchid. Here again a bored artist is dangerous. This corsage orchid bloomed for a couple weeks and not just one blossom but a cascade of blossoms. It was over the top totally on it's own. But it also was rather Georgia O'Keeffe. It begged to be painted digitally.