It has been some time since I last posted an entry. Immediately after I made the previous post I left for a trip to Sri Lanka. Whilst I saw and dis some wonderful things there, and met lovely people on either side of the religious/ethnic divide I also saw and heard some very disturbing things around the oppression and suppression of a Hindu Tamil minority by a Buddhist  militaristic theocracy. And I have not been ready to write about this, nor am I yet. Still, I will post this image taken of a fountain in a temple in Kandy. Continuing the peace theme, I wish this country, and other war torn countries peace.

Well, as you know, I often take photographs at the coast; stormy days, brisk days, hot sullen days; all interesting. This is an image of a simply quiet day. Gaia’s daughter Tethys at peace; the colours and textures all say ‘peace’. So, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you are; I wish you peace.

So, having published one image, distorted in photoshop, and though I now try and be cautious in the use of these techniques the image in this post is one of the favourite images that I have created, going back way before I started this blog. Feel free to see in it anything you choose; it is personal to you; I just hope that it stirs something in you,  it does in me.

Soon after I started using photoshop I discovered  some of the more curious options to manipulate the basic image, such as Distort and Stylise. It was fun and I overdid it, using them on practically every image I decided to work on. Then I took a second look  at what I was doing and largely moved away from these options as it had me stuck in a rut of producing fun yet very stereotyped images. Then I took a third look and concluded that occasionally they did produce something special, so I now try and use them very sparingly. The image in this post started off as some reeds in a marshy wilderness; the end result is a very minimalistic abstract.

I have really enjoyed creating and sharing this series of images, yet I do not want to get stuck in a creative groove so this will be the last for now; though I am sure I shall return to these images of turbulent water and distorted reflections. For this image I simply returned to an earlier photograph and tried a different crop. As before, less photoshopping than you might imagine; the colours, textures and patterns were there in nature; I saw it, photographed it and then used my imagination to create an image. Yet this second bite of the cherry could so easily have been missed; so I must always try and look at things with fresh eyes and fresh vision from time to time.

Well I had thought I would move on from the current series of enhanced water images so I started to work on some more classical Cumbria views. But the folder had more images from waterfalls and rapids and I started to look at them and …. hooked again. The technique is roughly the same …. Start with a good photo, crop it down to some interesting shapes, and enhance the colour; the rest is done by Gaia, with constantly changing motion, shapes and textures even on one set of rapids, and then there are so many more to choose from. I am having fun with these images, and creating work where I never fail to be surprised at the infinite varieties. This image even reminded me of some of my images of Australia from the air, several posts earlier, yet it is from a mountain stream near Stockley Bridge in Cumbria, and I was only a couple of metres away.

These images again started life as a photo just a couple of metres from the previous two.  Similarly they result from cropping and colour enhancement. I looked at both these images and liked both for slightly different reasons. The crop on the second is so severe, just the point where water tumbles between two boulders, so severe that it loses detail, yet enhances the impression of water and movement and turbulence and light.The first shows a little more detail and in so doing shows more of the beautiful forms created in nature. They are both deliberately impressionistic, trying to get the feel of this mountain beck and the moments I was there. The photos were taken literally just seconds apart; and show how slight changes in the flow, the wind, the light,  ensure that no two images will ever be the same at this spot. Add to that my own creativity in working on the photos and thus even more different permutations are possible. It all makes the point that the number of differing images is boundless, limited only by the creativity of nature and the imagination of the artist.

Like the previous entry this image started as a simple photo of a mountain stream. Actually it was only taken less than a metre from the previous image. Like its predecessor the only photoshopping was some severe cropping to get down to the bare essentials and remove extraneous detail and some heavy colour enhancement. The aim was to try and capture something of the energy of the water, something of its mood and vibrancy, in an image reduced to pattern and texture.

Well the previous post happened largely by accident. I was unsure what image I wanted to show next, what I wanted to say next, and came across the photo I eventually used whilst searching through my Australian folders; often a happy hunting ground. Yet there is nothing specifically Australian about it so I decided to look for photos with similar potential in other folders. I came across a series of photos, taken in Cumbria, of a small beck on the south side of e Crummockwater. So I played with it in a similar vein to the previous post. There is less photoshopping than you might think. The tumbling waters of the beck, reflecting the blue sky , red and yellow rocks, ripples and swirls in the water; all were there. So I enhanced the colour, obviously, and cropped it heavily to take out unnecessary detail; but no twirling or swirling, no distorting. Muse&Mentor tells me that any photographer can take a nice photo, a happy memento of a place visited, the artist/photographer chooses what to accept, what to reject and how to develop the art and create the image. So a happy collaboration between Gaia, our beautiful planet, and myself.

This image started as a photo of a rock pool on an Australian beach on a dull day. It looked … well rather dull. Yet something about it still appealed to me. So I cropped it a bit tighter and played with it in photoshop, trying many different options until I came to this result; all textures and patterns and colours and movement, not a photograph any more yet an act of photoimagination.
I love the image and I’m really happy to be moving on from the previous theme.