close your eyes and hope for the best

Fishing on Smoke Lake, Algonquin Park Ontario Canada. (click image to enlarge)

Photoshop is the digital darkroom of the 21st century and is one of the great tools available to us but in my humble opinion it is still all about light, exposure, composition and doing it correctly in-camera in the first place.

The other day I was standing in Chapters at the photography magazine section. If I am in the Big Smoke (Toronto) you can usually bet that at some point in my visit you will find me there. Scanning the wealth of magazines that are now available to photographers, I came across the Contact catalogue for the annual celebration of photography in Toronto. What struck me the most as I leafed through the publication is how dramatically photography has changed in the past 5 years. The numerous ways images are now constructed have changed the dynamics of photography’s relationship to reality. What seems to be happening is a creation of a new genre of art. Is it photography? Can we still call it photography? For those of you not familiar with Contact, it is the annual month long festival of photography spread across many venues in the Greater Toronto Area in May. It is devoted to celebrating, and fostering an appreciation of the art and profession of photography.

And since it is my turn to post a new blog, I have opted to provide an image that is probably more of a throwback to sandwiching slides together but have done it in Photoshop. The inspiration for this image came from a group of artists I work with. We have decided to have a show that focuses on abstraction rather than reality. Quite a coincidence since Contact is focussing on this genre. It is certainly not a new concept but for a photographer who sells images of time and place in real situations, a problem to get my head around. I could do what I am seeing a lot of, which is: throw a few images into the computer, add a mix master of Photoshop filters, plug-ins and hope for the best! (No pun intended).

The two images used to create the composite. (click image to enlarge)

I realized I could become completely engrossed in this process but needed to minimize my time on the computer. I looked through my images and found a nice texture shot of an old piece of pottery that had been outside for a few years. The image of a person fishing on Smoke Lake in Algonquin Park was originally a slide that had been scanned. After opening the texture image, I desaturated the shot as I was looking for more texture than colour. I then did a “select all” on the image. I opened up the fishing snap and worked in levels to bring out the sky more and bumped up some of the colours in hue saturation. I then did a select all - copied and pasted the fishing snap over the texture (I tried it the other way placing the texture over the scenic but the result was not as good) Experimenting with the different blends in PhotoShop I settled on hard light. Once done, I then flattened the composite, did a little tweaking with the burn tool in the foreground. This magical image was the result. You can see the two photos in the blog that show the original images I was working with. Probably more painterly than a photograph but it is still within the boundaries of today’s new standards for photography.

The digital era has spawned a whole new type of photography and photographer where literally thousands of images can be shot in a relative short space of time. Unfortunately the thought process now is to allow Photoshop to fix and correct all the errors. Photoshop is the digital darkroom of the 21st century and is one of the great tools available to us but in my humble opinion it is still all about light, exposure and composition and doing it correctly in-camera in the first place.

>From the cheap seats.

© Rob Stimpson

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 9:53 am and is filed under Rob Stimpson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.