zig zag of a valley in middle of a dream

 

 

In dreams I am traveling places I can barely remember. I know I will be in that place again, but this time while awake.

A yellow bye

Have you ever played with the white balance of your camera? Usually is modified to get accurate colors (cloudy, sunny, shade, tungsten, etcetera) but you can alter the way your camera sees the reality.

In this case I made the white balance cooooold xD so this sunset with reds and oranges skies would be a yolk yellow yummy color surrounded by blues ^^

So if there is a lesson today is that you can have fun and paint with your camera :P

Stitching experiment

Today was a busy day, and it seems is going to be a busy night…

This is a stitched photograph but the program I used to stitch, Microsoft ICE, filled the absent gaps in this way… for some reason I like it. It’s not a photography as it doesn’t represent what was in the reality, but I like the movement and dynamism of the composition so I’d say is a happy accident.

our bodies intertwined

I try to photograph based on my emotions. I try to communicate them with my knowledge as an architect from what I know about proportion, shape, scale, texture and symbol.

This photograph is the sea, it was already night and I had just my old tablet with its 3.2 megapixels but I didn’t care, I just wanted to don’t forget the soft sway of sea waves against the beach… the movement. I altered the few colors to express more and more of what I felt. Of course it could be not your cup of tea and that’s fine, if the world had the same preferences then we should just replace ourselves for a society of robots.

To be able to take this photograph as I wanted I needed the lessons learned across thousands and thousands of photographs.

About Art

I was thinking about it because I saw the work of a photographer with his medium format camera (the cheapest with a single lens can cost 9000 dollars, in contrast my humble camera manufactured in 2005 cost me 250 dollars) but there were mistakes between his goals in his mind (paintings) and the photographs he got; the compositions and colors he chose were the kind of errors I made too when I started to take photographs and edit them. I suggested him to use the help of a cell phone to sketch his photographs but he took the suggestion in a very badly way, lol. I didn’t say more, in any case I tried to search in my past if I had the same attitude, if you have a critic to my photographs and they can help me to be a better person (because my goal are emotions expressed in photographs, I’m not interested in being a photographer in the sense to be hired or sell photographs) then I will glad to read with patience. I’m happy with my only camera, I tried one of those sexy Fujifilm with better image quality but it was less funny, I think if I would lose my camera I’d like to buy a Samsung NX500,a Sony A7S II or a Sigma Merrill but in the end I would buy again my compact Sony R1, I think I don’t need equipment more expensive than a whole house to see the world (although money is needed to see the world hehe)

So I didn’t reply the gentleman, but I remembered the reality in my country. When Spaniards came they were tied to their religion and one terrible thing is that fantasy was banned, so instead of theater there was religious plays; instead of painting of what the soul asks only religious themes were allowed, and so on in every art. Until these modern times they hardly produce fantasy but mostly they copy what is fashion in Europe or USA, and if an artist produce something authentic it’s despised as something lack of value except when that artist get recognition in UE or USA. Instead in my culture the fantasy is important so our cinema is about creatures or fantastic ideas. And if you have seen my photographs I rarely see them as a document of the reality but more as a record of what I see with the eyes of my imagination, so in the titles I choose I hope you can see that I don’t see a stone or a chair, but a king or the wings of a giant. Of course that doesn’t mean I consider my culture superior, just different.

The case is that I don’t like to be considered an artist because in the reality of my country, where my civilization is a minority, art is the success in imitate what the artist in your country, dear visitor, is really producing from the mind. I don’t need recognition, I only know that I just simply do what I do, just because something inside burns me to do it.

Blue desert

 

Actually this is a sunset in the sea, but I played with the image until make it cold. Always when I see a lonely light it makes me think in a kind of theatre were we, the public, still are waiting for the actors to appear…

I’m using windows 8 and the internet browser is getting a bit annoying. It insists in crashing because I need to upgrade it, but in order to do that I need to upgrade first the Windows version, he. Well, instead I installed Opera. So far it looks pretty good and quite faster, although I miss the translation in the contextual menu and the horthographic correction, haha, just kidding, orthographic correction ;-)

“Andromeda is not there,” said the blue waves…

 

This is a image based in a photography I took in Ilo city. Usually when I edit a photograph my goal is to mirror what I think I saw, sometimes a kind of red, or a silhouette, so although some are blurred, others dark, some others saturated or desaturated in the end they are what I saw in my mind. Instead this image is a modification of the colors I saw, because the ocean there is turquoise and the rocks are darker, but my intention was to create a composition using a photograph as a start point. So to me this is a digital composition based in a photograph and not a photograph in the proper sense of the term.

I know photographers would disagree, regularly I read some of them ranting “I hate to be called ‘digital artist’!,” (what makes me think that they don’t have much love for digital artists, lol) but, hey, I’m not photographer ;-)

A sunny winter afternoon walking

“Hold my hand” says the blue man to the red lady

Yesterday I had to go outside a while, so I wanted to walk a bit around the plaza, it was unexpected so I hadn’t my super camera ACME Brand to take pictures but my tablet which I use to show my work to possible customers. I don’t like to use the tablet to photograph because it’s not ergonomically friendly to my hand. But it was the only camera I had with me so I took some views. The most of my visitors are from the northern hemisphere. Peru is crossing the mirror so we’re in winter.

Just shadows and mirrors…

My main camera has a big sensor to avoid much processing and get something similar to what my mind saw, nevertheless that’s hard to achieve with the little sensor cameras of tablets or phones, even compact cameras, so with them I allow myself to edit heavily. In this photographs I used the Snapseed app of my tablet, I have used filters, modified contrast, cropped and in part even I used frames to match what I felt.

Two lovers flying the empty walls of the forgotten city

The question with the camera was to foresee the future. The shutter lag and the time to focus, particularly in low light, make anticipate the shot two seconds before it happened. I started with a 0.3 megapixels camera and if you started like me with a cell phone then this behavior is something natural. Somebody that starts with DSLRs surely doesn’t know that problem (and for that reason could think in a cell phone as a toy) but also I guess that person lost the chance to train his/her mind to see the composition in the imagination and not in a screen or viewfinder.

a river marble in the blue night

But here you are: you cannot blame the camera, the one used for this publication is one from an old Samsung tablet. Of course that’s seen from my perspective of a dude that likes to doesn’t forget what he sees so take some pics; I know in the context to be a professional a photographer needs the perfect tools to match his/her skill and vision.

When (did) I change in her?

This post is categorized, besides photography, as altered. Because it goes beyond an usual editing but, and has passed a lot of time since I did something like this, I think the image is more expressive.

There was a big mirror in the street, unwittingly of be waking up our vanity :-)

Editions I wouldn’t do (much) again

white vignetting

I usually edit my photographs because I know their limitations and what I see and feel not always match but the camera sees. This because a camera, digital or film, are engineered to work with basic parameters, for example the white balance in one camera could tend to give the photographs a bluish tint. And I want to feel that I am not a camera tester but I’ve been able to take a photograph about something a saw as an expression or something I felt as an warm atmosphere.

As a beginner although I’ve committed crimestakes, I mean, mistakes, applying filters from third people and do a lot of editing till the photograph is more an image, interesting to me, but so different from what I saw or felt. The first image corresponds to white vignetting, I applied it but I think it has no much meaning. Clichés sometimes work, sometimes not.

Nevertheless I like the altered photographs but they are from a previous time.

saturating till see my eyes bleed

Saturation is very tempting. I try to saturate just when there is no another way to express my impression about a colour. And if it’s from landscape usually is not needed to saturate them because they are already strong.

as photographs of yore

Toned as the photographs from more than a century ago. We live in another time and we have to get our own road.

false film grain

Black and white is a honest way to see the world when your eyes are in love with shapes and textures, but the danger using presets is for example the simulated black and white grain, not from medium format but one from second world war. I don’t see the need for that, it’s a bit like despise the nature of a digital camera that has another grade of equivalent grain, the noise.

“reducing” noise till wipe details out

This could be a temptation when editing compact cameras that could be noisy at low ISOs or with the big ones when shooting at higher ISOs. In little sizes it doesn’t look bad but when you make them bigger it’s like it was more than a photography a painting with not so aesthetic big brushes.

Over sharpening till see the atoms dance

I’ve noticed that I try to abuse of that tool when my photographs are not in focus. Focusing carefully avoid to fall in this field.

I don’t say you shouldn’t to do that. Every person is free and I am going to remake the mistakes if the photograph can end as a nice image. Even more is healthy to try and to fail to learn.

Besides it is about having fun, and nothing funnier than make angry to photographic critics ;-)

World is not black and white

This is a little experiment reversing colors, you know, sometimes it has sense, mostly not. In this case I wanted to accentuate the dark against the light, and I thought it would work better reversed. I don’t know if I can call it photography, so I’m publishing it in another category.