Photography and the Creative Process

Serendipity and Social Commentary

February 5, 2008

I came across this statue of Jesus’s face, rent asunder, in a shop selling Christian religious iconography in Los Angeles. Schism, the photograph’s title was inspired by the crack in the statue’s face, but the more I looked at the image, the more it occured to me that the other elements of the image convey the sense of schism as well.

The right side of the image is dominated by Jesus on the cross. A brother holds a child in his arms, and the child looks lovingly up at the Christ on the Cross.

The left side of the rent image of Christ is a different story altogether. On the left, higher and larger than the crucifix is a statue of a person whose arms echo the arms of Jesus on the cross, but this person’s gaze is directed not on the Lord himself, but rather on the images above, highly iconographic images of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. Also on the left are various statues of Mary in the different forms in which she has been depicted, including a dark-skinned virgin in the background.

Kneeling on the floor in the left foreground are two children in prayerful pose looking up. Are they looking to the statue of Jesus before them, or are they instead praying to the various images of Mary, the face of one being surrounded by a halo’s glow, and both of which seem to have been placed just ahead of the Jesus statue, and thus, closer to the praying children.

So, while the crack in the face of Jesus brought to my mind the word “schism”, the rest of the composition speaks volumes about what that word might mean in the context suggested by the religious icons on display.

Focus on Religion

February 1, 2008

Alpha and Omega, the image in this post, is my latest addition to the Focus on Religion gallery at my online Photo Gallery. I invite you to visit the photo gallery and look at the other images as well.

Digital Black & White Photos

October 10, 2007

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.