Photography and the Creative Process

Seraphim at the 2007 Renaissance Festival

The 2007 Maryland Renaissance Festival has ended. I attended several times and walked around taking pictures.As a groupie to my friend, Charlotte’s women’s quartet, Seraphim, I naturally shot a lot of photos of their performances.

Seraphim performs each year at the Rennaisance fair, but also offers a traditional Christmas program. In addition, the ladies transform themselves into an Andrews Sister’s inspired quartet to perform music from the 1940’s.

My collection of Seraphim photos is featured in the Focus on Seraphim gallery.

The web address for that gallery is http://seraphim.wmgphoto.com/.

You may contact Seraphim for more information about their programs by sending email to SeraphimQuartet@aol.com.

Digital Black & White Photos

There are numerous ways to convert color photos to black and white in Photoshop. Simply changing the mode to grayscale or desaturating the photo are two simple methods that often result in a flat uninteresting image. A more sophisticated approach is to open the Photoshop Channels tab to find the three separate channels for red, green, and blue. Sometimes choosing only one channel and discarding the other two results in a richer and more compelling black and white image when ultimately converted to grayscale.

Hanging On a Pole, is an example of a rich photograph produced in this manner. While I shot this photo using black and white film, I nevertheless scanned it as a color image, thereby creating three channels of information, although it was shades of black, white, and grey in the three primary color channels.

Another photograph, Ocean City, was problematical because the light outside the archway was so bright compared to the internal scene that no one color channel worked in both segments of the image. Consequently, I kept only the red channel for the internal segment of that photo and the green channel for the windows outside. This process resulted in a nicely developed image.

To best appreciate these two photos, please visit The Gatesman Photo Gallery. At the gallery display pages, be sure to keep clicking on the image until you see it at its highest resolution.

So Much Esoteric Hoo-Haa

One may gather from my first two posts [What Makes an Artist, October 6, 2007, and My Autumnal Garden, October 4, 2007] the gist of this web site. Those posts illustrate, perhaps, a type of thinking that a dear friend and I often refer to as “oogly”. For fear that I might lose myself in the clouds of esoteria, I share with you the following observation by photographer Morrie Camhi as a splash of cold water to better keep things in perspective. Read the rest…

What Makes an Artist?

A recent correspondent, after looking at the photos in the Gatesman Photo Gallery, observed that telling our individual experiences through the process of “doing art” is a way in which we may connect to the universe. It is this ability, the correspondent suggests, that makes us humans and not just animals. Read the rest…

My Autumnal Garden: Thoughts on My Creative Process

My autumnal garden stands out in the neighborhood: an explosion of color standing 7 feet tall — the height of the Cosmos blossoms. Yet some of my other flowers have wilted, leaving seed heads that I pick and place in a jar for planting next spring.

My autumnal garden is a metaphor for my creative process. I had been planning to submit a number of photographs — some of which stand out, like the Cosmos blossoms, as images in the Gatesman Photo Gallery— to a black and white photo contest. Like my garden, which is responding to the lack of summer heat, my ambitions respond to the lack of available funds and time [starving lawyer that I am — the photo contest requires a submission fee and time to prepare the images], and my intention to submit the photos suddenly stands, barren of petals, a mere seed head of potentiality.

Like the flower seeds I have placed in a jar, these seeds of potentiality carry the promise of a new garden. No sooner do I screw shut the lid on the mason jar when images of a new forum — a new garden of creativity, if you will — rise up in my imagination.

This weblog is my new garden. Welcome!