Listen Visually

There are so many ways to be creative now with digital and all the different plug-ins available to us thru Photoshop. Today it’s going to be Painter. I started out as an artist, and then became a photographer. So today you get to see a photo that has been manipulated in Painter. This is a photo I did a few years ago of the Cowboy Poet, Waddie Mitchell. Another image from the same shoot was used on one of his books, but this one I decided to manipulate to give it more of a painterly look. I really liked the way it softened the hard edges and blurred some of the highlights.  The new version of Photoshop gives us some of the abilities to create this, but Painter does a better job of it.  This blog is going to be my way of talking about the many ways of “Listening with your Eyes”. What this means to me is that we can feel and experience our photos in many different ways.  Hopefully, we can learn to “listen” to our photos as they speak to us during the “making” and the “post-production” processes.  In this photo, the shadow cast by the light on Waddie was almost as important and the subject, at least to me.  I left sharp the areas that were the most important, as in the face. In future posts I hope to be able to talk about the creative process and “learning to see” as we put the camera to our eye to start creating images.  This involves shooting a lot, then looking at what we shot, and then figuring out how to make it better.  This comes with understanding the value of both highlights and shadows.  Shadows are often very important. Remember negative light is sometimes more important than positive light.

Until next time.