In my early years of photography, working with black and white and discovering the magic of darkroom printing, A friend of mine had all the color filters. And although I somewhat understood at the time what these filters meant and the effects that they had on black and white photographs I never really made the connection between what they did and what I wanted to achieve with my photographs. In other words, I could never really figure out how to use them. Why? I'm not sure. I guess I was busy "dodging and burning". Perhaps once I got to the darkroom stage and was engrossed in an image magically appearing on a blank page, I just forgot about everything else. It wasn't till a few years ago when I could see the immediate effects of a black and white conversion through software in Photoshop that i started to connect the dots. I realized that converting colour pictures to black and white was not as simple as just removing the colour. In fact, I realized that you can, with the adjustments and effects in these photo editing programs, practically do anything. The magic of the darkroom was replaced by the magic of immediate (or almost immediate) results of digital photography. (I will probably do something more in-depth on black and white conversion and filters and so on later.) I also realized after playing around with these special effects that, applied without 'vision', they can make photographs rather 'ho-hum'. Many cameras and editing software packages come with presets of special effects. I guess if you are happy with what those particular things give you as a result then by all means, have at it. But as most of the well known photographers and authors on the subject of creating photographs will tell you - if you are going to create an image, having a vision for the final image is key. Of course you can "spray and pray", just shooting thousands of shots, hoping to get something that you like, but this is terribly inefficient. Likewise, you can apply effects without thinking and see what you get. I spent hours with Photoshop (many photo-editing packages have similar effects) playing around with effects, adjustments and so on - and I won't say it was wasted time, because I got to understand what the effects had on the types of pictures I made. For those hours spent, I didn't generate too many satisfying pictures. However, now that I have an idea for what I can do, it helps when I do envision something. The fall image shown above - when I saw the scene (in person), it reminded me of paintings that hung in our living room when I was a kid. When I got home and brought it up on the screen I knew instantly what I wanted to do, what I wanted to create. And I knew more-or-less how to create it. Similarly, the sunflowers, snapped with a friend's camera was the same thing. When I saw the picture on the camera's screen, I instantly saw in my mind how I wanted it to look. It took me a while before I was happy with the result, but I got it. I will not explain how I got to these results, because in virtually every case, the approach is different, and the vision should be different as well. There are methods to achieve certain effects (example: the Lomo effect described somewhere on this website), but I can tell you that even these process don't work for every picture. The point here is to know the adjustments and the effects - to play with them until you understand them (remember to save your work under a different filename). Take some time when you can't get out and photograph - when you are stuck indoors, or without a subject. Look back at some older work, or assemble a still-life subject, and experiment. When you understand these processing adjustments and you combine this with your photographic 'vision', you open up many new possibilities for creating images. Create, don't just blindly "apply".
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After a year or so of no posts, I am back. It has been a tough year, with a ton of things going on. I will get back to more photos, maybe a new look and some new ideas. For now, check out the pages under "My Photos". A couple of hockey-related collections and one on racism :). This year, we will try to explore some of the fun of photography and talk about why we do photos "just for fun".
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John T."Photographs capture my viewpoint - based on my place on this planet, where I've been and who I am. If you 'get it' then you've been there too, either in mind, body, heart or soul." Also see the "EauPositivePhotography" pages for other stuff
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