the night forest

I took this with my trail cam one night up at our cabin in the mountains.  It is an infrared shot.  Then I did a bit of photoshop magic using Topaz mostly.  I like the noise that the camera added to the picture which gives it sort of an eerie feel to it. 

sacred nature stained glass

One of my favorite things to do when I am in Europe is to go see the beautiful stained glass windows that you find everywhere, in every country.  Recently I was inspired to create my own surreal abstract versions of stained glass using nature as the inspiration. In the fall of the year, before dusk, the woods up in the mountains of North Carolina have a stark and dark feel to them with their barren trees silhouetted  against the evening sky.  I love capturing the warm glow of the late afternoon sun as it peeks through the trees.  The red and orange glow and the black tree trunks remind me of stained glass windows.  With a bit of photoshop magic, I rendered the picture into a natural stained glass effect.  For this piece, I combined my stained glass creation with a picture I took at Orval in Belgium. 

nature's stained glass

The warm glow of the late afternoon sun peeks through a late autumn forest.  Using some photoshop magic, I created a surreal stained glass effect.  The trees become the lead, and the light becomes the glass.

night visitors 1

I started out with a dark woods scene captured in late autumn.  Then I created a bunch of butterflies out of a picture I found on the net with the use of the cloning and transforming tools in photoshop CS2.  I then funked up my dark woods photo with some topaz filters and added water using Flaming Pears Flood filter.  Finally, I combined the butterflies and the woods.  The final piece can be interpreted in many ways, but my take on it is that the butterflies represents life, and the dark woods represent death.  With death comes new life.  White butterflies are, to me anyway, a symbol of a new beginning. 

Is photography art?

Is photography an art and especially is it fine art?   That question has been debated for 100 years now, and the answer is still very illusive today.  After researching the question on the net, and having read 100’s of answers, I think it is best to start with the question of, “What makes something ART”.

Lets think about someone who would be considered as an artist by just about anyone in the world.  Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet, are a few that I can think of.  SO what makes these men, artists, and what makes their works, art? 

Each one of them, used tools - mostly brushes, and applied paint to a canvas.  Using their skill, their experience, their vision, and their imagination, they each, created paintings.  These paintings express their personal impressions of the subject.  We, the audience, each of us will perceive these works of art differently, but we all feel something that the artist put into the piece.  Emotions, feelings, and intuition, all play a part in our appreciation of the art.

Now when an artist uses a camera and software as his tools to create a piece of photo art, he is doing the same thing as  Van Gogh is doing.  Just different tools.  Now some may argue that Van Gogh created art by his skillful use of the brush and many hours of work in front on the canvas, and that the photo artist merely snapped a picture, and maybe did some manipulation using software, and he or she did not show any special skills in doing so.  First, the amount of time it takes to create a painting is not relevant.  Look at Picasso.  He took a canvas and painted a couple of curves and a few dots on it and in seconds, he had a finished piece.  Why is that art? It may have taken him seconds to create it, but it was his 20 years of honing his skills, that allowed him to create that piece of art.  Same thing with the camera artist.  He may have snapped the picture and took seconds or hours, to manipulate it in Photoshop to create his art piece, but again, just like Picasso, the long hours of learning how to use the tools, i.e. the camera and Photoshop, and very importantly, his or her imagination, is what allowed him or her to create the final work. 

Ansel Adams, as a result of many hours of observing nature, learning to use his camera, and learning the techniques of developing the negatives, he was able to see and feel the right moment and the right angle, to capture the picture.  In the darkroom, he continued the process and ultimately printed the picture.  His work is considered by many to be fine art.

In the final analysis, what makes it art, is not the length of time it took, or the tools used, but the skill and imagination of the artist, the ability to convey a feeling, to see with the heart.  It is the mastery of the process of arranging all the elements that result in creating something original. Something that brings out an aesthetic sensibility in us when we look at the art. 

beauty of decay -yellow daisy

One from my "Beauty of Decay" series.  This is "Yellow Daisy 1".  Again it is one of my scanography art pieces.  I had given my wife some Gerber Daisies for her birthday, and she was ready to toss them out after they had lived out their life as a bouquet.  She saw wilted flowers. I saw a beauty in the soft pedals that had fallen all around the vase - a wabi sabi moment. 

the artist

This is a self portrait, that started out as a photo of me, at the medieval Knights Templar Commanderie de la Romagne, at Saint-Maurice sur Vingeanne, in France.   I gave the photo  a  painterly look and changed the modern pen into an old quill.  I also made my modern shirt look more medieval. 

shadows of medieval times

Late afternoon, the sun breaks thru the stained glass window, and paints a shadow  on the wall of the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz .......

woods at dolphin rock abstract 1

.....one from my DOLPHIN ROCK series ..... there is a secret, mostly unknown place, in western North Carolina that has a rock formation, that looks like a dolphin jumping out of the water...... I was fortunate enough to have a friend show it to me ...... surrounding the dolphin, are a stand of birch trees that I captured in this still, and then I created a this painterly feel, using various techniques including different Topaz filters..... 

abstract yellow woods

one from my abstract series ..... it started out as a window reflection of the autumn woods, surrounding our cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina ..... funked it up, using various Topaz filters.........

reflections

in the cool mountains of western North Carolina, grows a pretty little plant called the spotted jewelweed... the flowers are less than one inch in size ..... an old Cherokee remedy for insect bites and poison ivy comes from the juice of its stems .....

Dandelion Dreams

this is another piece from my dandelion dream series..... enjoy ....

                                       Butterfly Dreams

The butterfly and the thistle are real, but the rest is just fantasy... in the spring each year, up in the mountains of western North Carolina, the butterflies enjoy a feast of mostly thistle nectar... you have to catch them a few hours after sunrise when the sun warms  their wings and they enjoy fluttering from flower to flower, until they are full...... it is kind of sad that most of them just live for a few days, but I realize that they lived first as a caterpillar, and then inside a chrysalis, so that in reality, they live longer than that ... but nevertheless, their lives are short in comparison to other animals .... so I enjoy capturing them so they can live on, as pixels for a bit longer ......

Dandelion Dreams 2

                                        Scanography Art

Another one in my Dandelion Dreams series......yes, it is a scan and not a capture from a camera...... I tried to create the illusion of the wind carrying the dandelion seeds into the night..... it would be difficult to create that feel with a regular camera.... the reason it has that  unordered look is because I did not try to place the seeds in any particular way, but instead threw them on the glass, over and over, until I got the desired effect....... if I had placed them, you would be able to tell because only nature can truly be totally random .....

blue waters abstract 1

This is a custom art piece that I did a few months ago.  It started out as a camera capture of a small stream in the Helen and Allen Cruickshank sanctuary in Rockledge Florida.  Just some weeds in a creek.  I played around with it in Photoshop using various TOPAZ plugins.  After a number of tries, I got a rather interesting abstract piece that I worked on for a while and then put it aside.  Then one day I showed it to someone and I started to try different crops and I changed it from a horizontal to a vertical piece... VOILA, he said he had just the place for it in his home.... and he now has it hanging up in his bedroom ...

dandelion dreams

this is one from  my dandelion dreams series.... this is actually a capture from my scanner ....It took me all day to arrange the dandelion heads on the scanner.... took 90 different scans until I found about 6 that I liked... this one has that feel of blowing in the wind that I was looking for  ....  other than cleaning up the dust from the scan, this is pretty much  unchanged from the original scan.... my time is spent arranging until I get just the right feel which I think I got on this one... I will be posting more of that series....