Well I've Slipped Up!!

 Here it is less than a week until Christmas Day and I havent started wishing everyone a Merry Christmas! I do hope you have a wonderful time with family, friends, and in whatever fashion suits you best get to celebrate the great gift we are given on that day! That is, of course, the Birth of the Baby Jesus!

   

 

I've been Experimenting!

And I would like to start off by saying that I have no use for AI or CGI images. I dont consider them photography. I dont even care for tools in the digital process that produce a particular "filter effect". I understand that digital, even from a scanned frame of silver based film means manipulating pixels, not how light falls on a photo sensitive medium, as in the "old days". I am 73 and started my "real" photography journey sometime in my early teens. By the age of 15 I had my own darkroom, developed my own film, and printed it. There were all kinds of ways I learned to "manipulate" both film and the final print. I didnt even condider digital until 2001or 2.

I feel the "manipulations" I make to digital images, at least the ones I have been presenting as photographs here, in prints, and on my Flickr page are only those that I could accomplish in a traditional silver darkroom. Without a doubt they are MUCH easier! I'm not sure if its as rewarding but I know digital has improved the quality of my photographs.  There is one Big Exception, dust spots! which I clone out, those of you familar with silver based remember the time consuming process of spotting! They are not happy memories for me.

What I have discovered and am persuing in addition to my photography is something I have seen referred to as Painterly Digital. I dont use, as the basis of my efforts tools like watercolor, sketch, etc. And definitely dont use AI with typed or spoken commands to ADD a setting sun or accomplish anything else.

I do take tools like sharpen, noise, blur, color hue etc and use them in combinations, orders, and strengths they are not really intended for. I even sometimes even "paint" digitally on an image, using different brush sizes, intensitys, and colors. That gives me the results you see here. I am learning how to produce these consistently and have found that different digital captures translate to better? images!

It ALL still starts with Seeing and the Light!

 

Left Click to enlarge! 

 

December 2, 1978

 At 3pm This Afternoon, By the Grace of God, We Will Celebrate 47 years of Marriage! It has been, and continues to be, the hardest job we've ever had, but NOTHING touches how rewarding it is!

 

That 47 years does not include the two years we dated or the two years we were engaged! Hallie, you know your arrival was.... The Rest of the Dream! 

  

I've Been Experimenting!

  But first of all let me make perfectly clear that this DOES NOT involve the use of AI ( artificial intelligence) or CGI ( computer generated images) ! I do use computer tools that are available to "process" my digital files, just in way they are not designed to be used. Or I use them at extreme levels, in combinations, or orders that are unusual.

  I have no use for AI or CGI, where you merely by voice or typed words descibe a "picture" and it is produced. Unfortunately this type of image is harder and harder to didtinguish from a photograph actually taken and processed by a human. And yes I know that the vast majority of photographs today use digital media!  Its exactly the same difference as manually driving a car or watching a movie while your car drives itself. 

  One of the difficulties in this is the struggle to make sure AI isnt sneaking itself into my process! As I write this I notice a little symbol off to one side of a pencil with a star beside it! I'll bet that clicking on it would let AI rewrite my words! I am NOT going to find out. 

 At any rate I'm having fun figuring out which images can be manipulated into something interesting , at least to me -and how to get there with tools/sliders that are basically just performing operations on the millions of pixels that make up a typical digital image!   

Here are two images, the first is a photograph captured and processed to reveal what I wanted- in the tradtional sense of color photography.  The second is that same image then made into something else?  I'm trying to decide just what to call this "new" finished image. Any Suggestions?