Naked To The Eye

Sometimes, there’s no winning. I couldn’t do it yesterday so I shut the conversation down. I couldn’t get through. Everything was an excuse. Or, a weird kind of arrogance. I have no use for that.

Oh well. Another war lost. One I shouldn’t have fought.

These two pictures are of the same location. They were made from a parking lot in Jefferson Parish. If I’m not mistaken, they are the same frame. They are just reworked in two different ways.

I did this to teach myself something about processing because there is a lot of things I have yet to learn, especially in the digital world, which is often an enigma to me.

No matter what happens, learning is paramount. If you aren’t a life long learner in at least one thing, I’m pretty sure that early onset dementia sets in.

Oh, it’s not that extreme. But, you know what I mean.

You learn. The first thing is technique. Then, come a lot of things. Feeling. The ability to leave spaces for the work to breath. And, then to be able to strip the work down to its barest essentials without losing the feeling and intent.

That’s the key to knowing.

Two photographs. Two photographs processed in very different ways.

The first way was to just make a kind of art. Or, to make the sky look like it did in Los Angeles when I was growing up. Green.

The second image looks like night even though I made it at about 11am. The film industry calls their technique “Day for Night.”

I didn’t use that. Instead, I removed the color until it was black and white and I darkened it until night came to the picture.

That’s it. The take away is simple. You don’t always need filters. You can do it yourself.

You can.