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. 

Week 50 - 2017 in Photographs

Day 343

 All seven pictures this week were taken at Eagle Nest Lake State Park. I live within an easy drive from three state parks and every year buy an annual pass just so I can park and photograph the treasures around me. All three, Cimarron Canyon, Coyote Creek, and Eagle Nest Lake are known for their fishing, but I love them most when nobody is there to take advantage of that. On the day I took these photos nobody was there at all. There was no wind, and while it looked as if it could snow more but it didn't.

I was early for some appointment, which was so unimportant I have forgotten, and stopped in at the main boat dock just to kill time and maybe catch a pelican or two. The lake was like glass and only a few small ducks and fish feeding disturbed the surface. Frequent followers of my photography blogs will know I love a good reflective surface. I find them mostly on ponds and not large lakes so this was a delight.

Day 344

 Eagle Nest lake was created by a group of ranchers who built their own dam to hold water which is used to irrigate ranch land from here to Raton. The dam is in the V between the two hills which mark the beginning of Cimarron Canyon.

Day 345

I loved the colors of that overcast day. The white from a bit of snow on the ground, the gold grasses and red willows, and the deep blue of the mountains. A lot of my photography is still used as reference for paintings. People believe I make up all my colors, and even that I am guilty of photo manipulation. Yes, I do that. I like to say of my paintings that they are what you think you saw. And I do play with digital images, but all the colors in these photographs, even the one directly below, are due to changing light during my hour killing time.

Day 346

Day 347

Day 348

Day 349

Week 46 - 2017 in Photographs

Day 315

Going to get this week's photo blog done early. And interject a bit of a change up from my usual count down. Several of this week's images have another version and, as in the case of the photograph below, have appeared in a weekly blog in that other treatment.

Day 316

Week 44 - Black and White

I think in the case of the old Questa church there is merit in either version.

Day 317

Day 318

The color original

And while I am a lover of color I find the black and white version of this cottonwood grove better artistically. Maybe I will have to try the same thing with dawns. Though that seems unthinkable. 

Day 319

Day 320

The original photograph

In this day of photoshopping everyone asks, "But what did the original photograph look like. And above you have the answer. I also did this one in black and white.  Which brings us to the question of why? Sometimes a photograph has good bones. There is something in the photograph you liked when you took it, and even when it was uploaded to the computer but it just does not shine through. In day 320 it was the lines of the trees and their reflections in the water. The version I finally posted shows that off best.

In black and white

Below is the caretaker's old red pickup. If you are a follower of my photographic blogs or Facebook page you will recognize this truck. But I am still looking for the ultimate picture of it. I love the red on freshly fallen snow but mostly the red gets in the way. There is another picture of this truck coming this week in my daily posts.

Day 321

The old red pickup

Creative Play with Trucks

Big Red One

I love old trucks. They are such fun to find and photograph and also a lot of fun to play with in the dry darkroom. After this last snow storm the trucks seemed all that much shinier and brighter. And there is the ice and glass and paint combination.

Big Blue One

Add in reflections in glass and rear view mirrors and it makes for a really fun photo shoot. I loved the way this photo of Big Blue's rear view mirror was great way to show the trees in the snow.

Rear View

Big Red Two

This red truck has been featured a lot in my photos. But I liked it particularly with the snow and ice cycles.  It is a trusted ranch vehicle but if photograph one is any indication it is have not the best of days. Cold weather can be rough but that is what pickups are designed for.

Ice Lashes on Big Blue

There is nothing so beautiful as a much loved old truck when it makes it through the storm.

Art Sunday - Post Processing

Lines

Photography has been in my life for as many years as crayons or paints but until lately I saw it primarily as a tool to aid in painting or as a way of recording the events of my life - the scenes that played in the background. But the age of digital photography has changed that. Today I find myself often "painting" in pixels.

Some disdainfully call it photoshopping, or photo manipulation. The spindoctors in the photographic world have come to use the term post processing, and making correlations with dark room processing with film. I tiptoed in and around the subject for some time. I have had a computer program for digital manipulation of images for longer than I had a digital camera. I would have digital images put on a CD when I had my film processed. I used Photoshop to crop, reduce an image to lines to print on watercolor paper for painting, or airbrush out that annoying artifact in a picture. After succumbing to my first digital camera in 2006 (primarily to record my paintings) I explored adjustment of brightness and contrast. Delicately.

My new digital camera having more megapixels requires a bit more playing with brightness/contrast and hue/saturation. It is the nature of the beast. So is my curiosity. What if games ensued primarily with marginal photographs. Take the bridge across Coyote Creek above.

Coyote Creek Bridge before post processing

I was attracted to the patterns of shadow, planking, and unmelted snow. Years of working with film cameras makes me pretty good at framing a photograph but immediately I wanted to crop off the top of this one. But I also wanted to accent what I saw - the patterns - so I post processed further with hue/saturation over the top.

For an artist that has been attracted to patterns and textures since darkroom 101 in college pushing the limits of my Corel Paintshop Pro program was exciting.

 The original shed roof

Post processed shed roof

It also brought out the artist in me. No longer was photography just a way of recording a scene to take to the studio and use as a basis of the painting. It became a digital painting. I have a friend I met at an art fair that takes this one step further. She prints her image on canvas and then adds texture and detail with paint. It becomes hard to tell where the photograph ends and the painting begins. Art fairs are trying to find a term for this new "mixed media." So far I don't think they have exactly hit on the fact that it is just photography until you add the paint.

Volkswagen original image

Volkswagen post processed

The key in "digital art" as in all art is the artist. There exists those that think because the world has invented another technical tool they can do it. But if they don't have the eye to take the original photograph or manipulate it correctly no amount of technical toys will help. Photo manipulation programs are just darkrooms for the modern photographer. And at no time since the advent of complex color film kicked us out of the basement darkroom have we had such control over our final image.

There are the purists that think Ansel Adams would be rolling over in his grave. But he was as fond of darkroom manipulation of his image as most were in the day of B&W film. I think he would be ecstatic about post processing on a computer. But he also would not toss out the importance of the original image. No amount of digital manipulation will turn a bad photograph into a great photo image. You have to have an artist's eye.