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First Exploration
Balance
Not Present
Fireworks
Elegy
Woods Man
Dreams of Days Gone By
From Here To Eternity
Lost Dreams
The Fire
Life
Emergence
Suspicions
Topographies
Looking Under the Surface
Welcome Back
Libraries are great places. I love them I can learn from new books and grow my avenues of creativity. Last week I checked a new book in the local library, "Photoshop for Artists". While I am pretty experienced at Photoshop I keep to doing what I know. The key enlightenment for me, from this book, was the use of Layer Blending. I had known about Masking and Opacity / Fill manipulations, but I found a new world of creative solutions with the Blending. This book wasn't written for just photographers. It was written for visual artists incorporating design, drawing, painting, and photography. Once you open your eyes to how others solve problems it can create new possibilities for your own creative solutions.
I know I will hear it from photography purists that these are just computer manipulated graphic design. Anything where you do more than exposure correction in Photoshop is considered computer manipulation by these purist, but then I have always qualified what I do as photographic-based art having also done graphic design. The ironic thing is that Photoshop is actually a paint program that approximates what can be done in a dark room. I started doing sandwich and manipulated prints in both the b&w and color darkrooms at the University of Washington twenty years ago.
Well as I have said before figurative art is not necessarily sinful, even if it delves into sexual symbols that have as much to do about life, death, and eternity as they do about creation and ecstasy. People are not evil if they are happy or content with their physical appearance, quite the contrary, trying to make people guilty about their physical appearance is evil.
These images are not meant to be sexist or racist. Yes, most of them do not have males in them but that is because of the images I had taken that I found to work in these Blending explorations while also addressing those issues that are in my subconscious mind. Yes, they were made by a male. I can't change that, then again they were made by someone of the human species so I have that in common with all of the subjects. They do include a wide variety of ethnicities and yes, I am of mixed ethnicity. By the way, the couple in my 'From Here To Eternity' were happily married, and I presume still are.
Editions are limited to twenty in their original size. Unframed, unmounted, and unmated prints are priced at $200. Framed, mounted, and matted prints are priced at $500 (includes frame's glass).
