After eyeing several photographs from the past couple of years, I finally updated my portfolio of Various photos. The key with these few photographs has been isolating the elements and muting the color to reach the desired effect. Photography, unlike painting, is an art of substraction. Whereas with painting or sculpting the artist creates something from scratch, continually adding elements to fulfill the vision, photographers with a good eye are trained to remove elements from nature or from the scene in order to bring out their vision from the scene. What’s interesting for me is how I’ve evolved in finalizing the photographs to account for the vision that I had when I took them. Each step of the way, I have improved on a different element or tool: color, framing, contrast, patterns, center of gravity. While some of these new photos are really old, it’s clear to me that I saw something striking but wasn’t sure how to bring it out, both digitally — which refers to the techniques in Adobe Photoshop — and in the context of the scene — what’s the emotion or theme in that particular photo. The main work for my most recent photos has been in removing or reducing the effect of color and details, while bringing out the patterns, contrasts, shapes and dynamics of the scene to the forefront.
Enjoy!