The making of...
Downtown Phoenix, AZ 2018.
I was driving by and had seen this car just as I was passing, and was just making up my mind on whether I wanted to stop so soon after having stopped for another picture, but if the image is good, who cares right?, and then I glimpsed ahead another scene I wanted to photograph and that quickly settled the debate.
(Warning, this is going to be a long parenthesis so if you don't want to loose the train of thought, skip ahead: sometimes I feel guilty for having a debate on whether stopping to take a picture because you know, this is what I do. But then again, I can stop almost anywhere and through trial and error, some clever framing, etc. I can come across some interesting pictures. So if I were to stop every time I can make something interesting I would be stopping all the time, and that just isn't compatible with the work schedule I keep, and I also think this would feel stale because I would be more spread-out and disperse when something really interesting came along)
so I had to stop. I was closer to the second picture I saw so I worked that scene first and loved the photo that came from that.
I finish up and start walking back to where I had seen the semi dismantled car, stopping here and there, taking a few pictures of things along the way.
As I stand before the scene. A classic dismantled car, possibly being worked on, the camper leading into it, a light and dark zigzag...I eventually captured these to my satisfaction.
Later that day, as I'm a self-taught photographer, I decided to try on a little something I was starting to research on how to accomplish with Photoshop. Strictly speaking the tutorial didn't call for changing the color cast of the lights and shadows (but how to manipulate the tonal values of each individually), but I experimented with the hue as well to see the effect, and found it interesting to say the least.
I still consider myself a straight photographer in the sense that I try to highlight reality's hidden attributes just as I find them, but that doesn't keep me from experimenting with other approaches to an image, because how can we be sure we are really choosing one thing over the other without branching off and tasting it for ourselves?
Andres Gonzalez
