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.

Click here to see more of my work 

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

 http://www.william-beuther.artistwebsites.com

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

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:

www.william-beuther.artistwebsites.com

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:

www.william-beuther.artistwebsites.com

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.

Colorful Cotswolds

Oxford Medley

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The Cotswolds, an officially designated Area Of Natural Beauty, was one of the places I visited on a two week walking tour in England.  These wonderful old buildings are in Oxford, home of the famous university.

Americans and British do have differences in spite of sharing a language.  On one walk, a group of locals asked where we were from.  When we replied the United States, they said, "We know that!  Where in the states?"  Talk about different, this is a group of British students waiting for their school bus. 

 

I loved the beautiful old trees.  The top photo is on a footpath along the Thames River near Oxford.  The bottom one is an old churchyard in Chipping Campden.

A Spot of Rain

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Of course it rained, this is England.  Fortunately, I brought a raincoat for my camera.  The top image is in Bourton-on-the-Water.  The bottom one is in Lower Slaughter.

 

Neighbors

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 Most days were sunny and bright, such as the day I captured this in Bibury

England is crisscrossed with public walking paths that traverse private property.  Established in the Middle Ages when roads were few and far between, the law states that any path not used in a year reverts to the property owner.  Walking groups hike every foot of pathway each year to keep them all in the public domain.

             

Fences separate farmer's fields and there are many gates, such as this one, to keep their animals contained.

 

 

Broadway Tower

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This is the path to Broadway Tower, located atop the highest hill in the Cotswolds.

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