Exploring the art of photography- A Saturday Walkabout.

Downtown Phoenix, January 13th 2018.

In photography, there seems to be at least two poles of how a photographer approaches his or hers images. Those who try their best to leave images as much as possible, as shot from the camera with no mayor modifications after the picture was taken, and those who view the post editing as part of the artistic process of photography, obviously passing by the ones who use the post production to retouch it like a magazine photograph, which exist in abundance, and into the realm of those who continue studying shape, line and color in the post production phase, bearing no limit on how much manipulation is appropriate, and just let the image lead the way, in a similar trance induced in the experience of when you're taking the actual images.

I for one am glad, I place myself in the latter, that is the ones who experiment freely with the post production process, and will like to continue honing my digital art toolkit, to continue exploring this facet of what I believe to still be, the art of photography.

The following photographs are from today's walk about, even though I had another blog article to publish today, from last weekend's walkabout which I could've finished editing today, I instead ended up playing around with an image I took today, and a couple of beers into the editing phase, I became fascinated by the exploration of this image, particularly during the editing phase.

I was already heading back to my car, and then a very interesting scene started unfolding in front of my eyes.

I had already exited an alley where I had taken more than a dozen pictures in, and even had placed the cap on the lens again. But as fate would have it, as you can see, I became at first interested in a play being performed between the sky, the wall, a corrugated metal fence and a cable.

After which on my right I noticed a see through fence, and after taking some shots of the inside contents beyond the fence.....

.....immediately after, against this same fence on the right side, there was a some sort of open mirror box, besides a mailbox, outside a door frame. When I took the shot, I wasn't really sure what had drew me to this image, except that it was interesting to me.

Below you'll find three version of the same photograph I took of this scene, the first with minimal post-production manipulation, the second with what I would say my normal amount of manipulation, where I mess around with the overall coloring of the image, darkening or lighting areas more than they would naturally be, etc. and the third version, was me, branching out of Lightroom and into Photoshop, with only a basic understanding of how to move around Photoshop, and doing a little more complex editing with masks and inverted selections, etc.

Now I can't unsee the face that appeared on the third version of the photograph, and it makes me wonder if in fact my unconscious saw this and guided my interest on this image or not. It could've very well been a total and random accident, and I guess it all comes down after all, on what I want to believe happened :) jejeje.....

Andres Gonzalez