Sunday, August 20, 2017
Medina International Festival
Click on link to see photographs in DropBox
DropBox Photographs
See Bill's work on Fine Art America
www.bpfa.biz
Friday, August 29, 2014
Grazing Lady
I love the wild horses of the Outer Banks in North Carolina. I believe this infrared image of a horse grazing on the
sparse vegetation symbolizes the wonderful freedom we enjoy. Colorizing the original black and white adds
a sense of drama for me, especially in the sky.
I also enjoy the image in its original black and white. Either way, the image speaks to me and I want
to share it with others.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Published
In the past few weeks, two of my photographs have been selected for publication. While my work has appeared in print before, it was either images of local events in area newspapers or commissioned portraits I did for a national trade publication. This is the first time I have had any of my fine art work published and I am very excited!
Street Beat appeared in the August issue of Eye
on Fine Art Photography magazine, which featured street photography. The photograph was taken in the French
Quarter of New Orleans.
Hangin' Out was selected for The Artists of Rubber City (AORC), Present
Tense, Contemporary Art in Ohio,
a Juried Exhibition in Print. I took
this at the Oakley House Plantation in Louisiana.
I certainly have no expectation that my work will continue to get published, but it is a lot of fun when it happens!
Visit my gallery at the following link to see
more of my work
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Woodland Gem
Lee and I visited Nature Realm in Akron a few weeks ago and I took along my infrared camera. I am on a roll right now with colorizing black and white images in Photoshop, so I decided to play around with one of the photos I took and this is the result, which I call Woodland Gem.
I like the original, which is below, but am fascinated with how changing colors causes us to see things in very different ways.
Woodland Gem is available through Fine Art America at the following link.
Woodland Gem
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Wednesday, July 23, 2014
What If?
Creative people ask the question, what if? What would happen if I tried this? Lee and I were on the Blue Ridge Parkway in heavy fog last
April when the mists partially cleared and we came upon this scene. Beautiful!
I knew when I took this photograph that I was going to convert it to B&W.
This shot was taken with my regular camera, but I also had
my camera that captures infrared (IR) light that is just outside of the visible
spectrum and turns it into visible red.
I usually use it in bright sunlight because the way it makes greens lighter
and blues darker creates very dramatic images.
What would happen, I thought, if I tried the IR camera here to lighten
the green? Wouldn't that accentuate the
ethereal feeling of the B&W image?
This is the out-of-the-camera IR
photograph. Hard to tell how well it
worked.
Here it is converted to B&W. Wow! I
really like this and will enter it into shows.
I thought I was finished with this image. But then the question popped into my mind,
what would happen if I tried colorizing it?
I played around with adding a texture and then using a rather obscure
Photoshop feature, and voila, I got this image! One of the really cool things is that
Photoshop added colors based on the relative lightness and darkness of the
underlying image and texture, thereby distributing them throughout the image,
something good painters do to achieve balance in their paintings.
I have been trying this technique on other IR images and often don't like the results. When it works, Wow!
You can see more examples of IR images at my website:
Saturday, July 12, 2014
A Painters Perspective
Painters have always fascinated me. As a photographer, I capture something that
already exists. I may arrange things or
pose people, select my perspective and framing, make artistic decisions
through lens selection and camera settings, and alter images in postproduction;
but I always wind up working with existing images.
Painters begin with a clean sheet. They create something from nothing. How does that change the way they see the
world? How would my photography change
if I were also a painter? Well, I'm not, and I really don't intend to become
one. But I did decide to take an
intensive four-day beginners watercolor workshop from a master painter named
Fred Graff, and it was an eye-opening experience.
Fred is amazing! The
way he sees things, the way he interprets them, his painting style, and his
workshops are all indescribable. They
must be experienced, not to be understood, but to be appreciated.
What did I learn? That painters tend to look for shapes rather than things. I got
a painter's view of color theory, design and composition, spatial
relationships, focal point, planes, contours, light sources, implied lines, proportions,
perspective, values, and vignettes. I struggled
with painting techniques such as wet into wet, wet into dry, dry into dry, underglazing,
overglazing, color mixing (paint and light work differently), lost and found
edges, and negative painting (basically, you paint over everything that is not
your subject). Sound confusing? Try doing it!
The workshop was great fun and I met some really nice
people, but will it change my photography?
Absolutely! I just don't yet know
how. But over time, as I ponder and
assimilate the experience, there is no question that the way I view and
photograph the world will be altered, perhaps profoundly, by what happened to me over
these four days.
I close this post by sharing more samples of what I did and by
thanking Fred Graff for warmly welcoming a non-painting photographer who had
the audacity to enroll in one of his watercolor workshops.
You can see examples of Fred's work at this link:
http://www.fredgraff.com/html/paintings.html
My photography is available at:
Friday, April 11, 2014
Kiss Tribute
Well, the band is finally in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and this is my tribute. These photos were taken at their September, 2009 Cleveland concert, where I was fortunate enough to have a photo pass. I used Photoshop and Corel Painter to get a distinctive look that hopefully expresses the essence of Kiss.
Okay, it's not the original band, and I know that bothers
some people a lot, but I wasn't into photography back then and couldn't have
gotten a photo pass if I had been. It is
today's band and I think they are worthy of all the kudos they receive.
Unfortunately, prints of these images are not for sale due
to copyright restrictions. I do hope you
enjoy them and share this site with others.
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