Which One Is Real?

When I came upon these masks in a store window while strolling down a narrow street on a cloudy day in Venice, this is what I saw.  Masks.  My eyes were riveted on the masks.  I found the range of emotion they displayed to be compelling.  Inanimate objects expressing human emotions, and expressing them very well.  And the reflections of buildings and passersby in the plate glass window added an ethereal touch.  Wonderful!  I waited for a break in the crowd and took just one photo.

This is the photograph I took.  It accurately portrays the scene, but not what I saw.  It does not evoke the emotional reaction in me that I had in Italy when I saw the masks.  I find the background way too distracting and harsh.  I barely noticed the background when I took the photograph.  

Cropping helps, but there is still too much going on in the image that takes away from the masks.  What I saw was soft and ethereal rather than harsh and angular, so I used Photoshop to soften background and angularity.  

The final image has a vignette to white and is printed on watercolor paper.  It has been in several shows and people seem to either like it or find it somewhat disturbing.  Regardless, it gets noticed and it evokes an emotional response, which is what I think art is all about.

I have had many conversations with friends, photographers, and painters about the ethics of altering photographs for artistic purposes.  Future posts will probably go into this in more detail, but for now the question is, which of these images depicts reality?  I think you already know my answer, what is yours?

Pondering

I have been pondering why I like photos with garish colors when my normal preference is for black and white.  Why black and white?  The obvious answer is that I see it as more dramatic and more interesting.  Why?  Because color sometimes seems to get in the way.  It distracts.  I think there are two reasons for this.  First, unless we are totally colorblind we see the world in color.  To present it without the color tends to cause us to look more closely.  Familiar things become less familiar, and thus require more of our attention. 

The second reason, however, gets to the core issue for me.  My motivation for photographing a scene is usually very simple, I like the way it looks.  I have recently realized that what has attracted me to scenes are their abstract elements, primarily line, shape, and form.  Pattern and texture also matter to me but they tend to be secondary.  I find that black and white lends itself to emphasizing abstract elements in my photographs, making them more interesting to me.  I often enhance this by subtly changing values within the image and sometimes adding a hint of texture. 

Ironically, it turns out that radically altering colors can give the same results; requiring more of the viewer's attention and emphasizing abstract elements.  It is not something I would do with all, or even most of my images, but I will over time develop a collection of very colorful images.

A quick update.  Since my last post we decided on the five images for the Library Project and the 20x30 metal prints just arrived.  They are BEAUTIFUL!  The "winners" are the two in this post and numbers 2-4 in my last post.  I can hardly wait to see them in the Library (scheduled for February, 2013).

Library Project

When our local library contacted me recently about putting in a permanent display of very colorful and very contemporary photographs of area parks, I realized it was a great opportunity to get very funky.  They definitely wanted something that fit into their "uber-modern" decor, so I took photos and went a little crazy in Photoshop with duplicate layers, blending modes, color overlays, and layer masks.  These are some of the results.  

Five of them will be mounted as 20x30 metal prints on a wall in the computer area. 

Trains

I have been a railway buff all of my life.  As a small child, we "rode the rails" from Ohio to Delaware to visit family.  Later, my friends and I would ride our bicycles down to the Nickel Plate station in Rocky River to watch the 700-series steam engines thunder past.  Talk about awesome!

On a recent visit to Cleveland's Flats, I stumbled across the yard and roundhouse of the Midwest Railway Preservation Society, a place I had wanted to visit for some time but had never gotten around to.  Two members happened to be working there and invited me into the roundhouse to look around.  Wow!  To a train buff, it was hallowed ground.

These are just a few of the many photos I shot that day.  Hopefully there will be many more as I plan to return.  

 

The organization's website, which is under construction, may be viewed at the following link. http://www.midwestrailway.org/

Options

Digital has had a profound impact on photography, particularly with postproduction.  We have a multitude of options today that would have been unimaginable with film.  But that blessing comes with a price.  Sometimes all those options can be confusing.

A case in point for me is this infrared photograph I took of this young man walking down a desolate street on Cleveland's eastside with the city's skyline in the background.  I liked it but found the overhead wires to be distracting so I decided to take them out in Photoshop.  While I was doing that, I started to play around with the image and came up with these variations.

The problem is that I like all of the images and now I can't decide which one to use. I guess nobody ever told me photography would be easy.

Babcock State Park

I recently spent a week at Babcock State Park in West Virginia with my son and his family.  It's a place where we vacationed often when I was a kid, and it has changed surprisingly little over the years.  Talk about bringing back a flood of memories.  The highlight for me was climbing on the rocks in the stream with my nine year old granddaughter, Sami.  It was like I was a kid again, playing with a friend.

 

The Grist Mill wasn't there when I was a kid, but I love it anyway.  It is now the iconic image of Babcock. 

The mountain stream it's on feeds the old swimming area.  We used to sun ourselves on the large flat sloping rocks.

There is a small island in the old swimming area today, which I caught in the early morning light.

We stayed in adjacent log cabins, each surrounded by trees, on a hillside with the mountain stream close by.  My dad used to read stories of the frontier to my sister and me before we went to sleep at night when we were little.  It was easy to imagine wild Indians roaming about in the woods outside our cabin.

The only nearby store in the old days was in Clifftop, a couple of miles down the road.  The now abandoned building it still there.

I'll close with a photo of Sami.  What a wonderful gift to be able to share something with her that was so important to me when I was her age.

Reflecting on Awards

Coaster Reflections is now at the Butler Institute of American Art's Midyear National Exhibition in Youngstown.  I still find it hard to believe it got into the show.  Receiving awards and being juried into shows is certainly validating, and also a lot of fun!  But the question is, why?  Why does one photograph get accolades while another, that seems to have similar qualities to me, is ignored?  

I think part of the answer lies in what the viewer, in this case a judge, brings to the table.  My first award was for a small print of an historic house.  Later, someone who knew the judge told me that his "thing" was lighting and that he had loved the way the image was back-lighted.  My award had nothing to do with the subject, just how it was lighted!  More recently, Reflecting (a study of masks) won an award from a judge who loves masks.  I understand these works have quality, but so do the other works submitted or entered into shows.  Something about an image reaches out and grabs the judge, and the artist has no way of knowing in advance what that will be.

The point of my ramblings is this.  I have been tempted to focus on trying to get into juried shows and win awards when I create images rather than creating them for myself.  I realize this is a false path.  My goal needs to continue to be to create images that move me.  If they move someone else, fine.  If not, fine.  I need to be true to myself and grow as an artist.  Okay, enough said.  I promise not to pontificate in my next post.