I started Aspects of Winter wanting to show the build up of colours in a snow scene, and I think going from black and white, to sepia, finally to a painting style of colour achieves that. As I was working on getting this right I released that there was something to gain by including a little unevenness. The images themselves are not clones of each other. Each is an individual photograph, and each has been cropped individually. The idea is to open up the view through the series of images and to try and capture that up and down trudge that is the hard work of walking in deep, and freshly fallen snow.

Aspects of Winter is an attempt to capture the changes in colour and movement that comes with snow.

What’s next – lets see what happens when I move this to a T-Shirt design.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve recently been working on a photo of a Japanese temple guardian that was taken at Narita. Quick travel tip – if you do to Japan don’t just use Narita as an airport. It is a charming town with a wonderful complex of temples.

Now back to the point.

What I wanted to do was make the Guardian become unnaturally in your face without looking .. well wrong.  After my first run at the editing I wasn’t convinced by the picture. There areas that were too bright and blown out, and possibly evidence of over sharpening.

At this point I put down the picture and saved it for future reference. There comes a point in editing, be it an image or an article that you no longer see what you have done. Everything sort of blurs together and it kind of feels just good or bad. When this happens I always recommend walking away and coming back afresh sometime later.

However this time when I came back and wasn’t quite so sure about the picture. The technical questions were still there and now I wondered if this was a worthwhile endeavour. Normally  when i create something I do it for myself in the hope that someone else likes it. This is I believe artistically wise. Not so sure if its commercially a great idea as my tastes may not be that commercial. Normally I live with this and things go ok. This I started to worry if what I was doing was mightily disconnected from what people want. After all if people have no chance of liking what I produce why produce. It was a moment of self doubt.

Then I remembered this – its the reason why many people do not progress artistically. It is the self doubt that prevents action.

What do I do?

Work on something I feel better about and go back to the temple guardian at some point in the future. I might even post it on Facebook and see if a discussion ensues. You mustn’t let self doubt stop you. You must just keep on at it.

Over the years like a lot of people I have taken a very large number of photographs. Some have been printed, and some shared online. I have recently started a shop on Redbubble.com and of course this means that I need images to stock it with. The question is how do you chose the pictures to put out in the hope of a sale?

One school of thought tells me that I should be developing a distinctive artistic style and dedicating the shop to this style. This approach has strong artistic merit. It makes a statement about the work that I produce and creates a direction for the future.

This is all well and good but it completely ignores the back catalogue. Sure my current work is of a more consistent quality and does have more fingerprints to identify me with than pictures created in the past, but should I be precluding the past. Amongst the past are a number of pieces that have been well peer reviewed by others – which means the merit of these photographs is a known thing. So why not include them, and if I want to be sure of an artistic statement, surely the past is a signpost to the present.

I think you can guess how my decision worked out.

I’ve decide to slowly increase the library in Redbubble using my latest images and a selection from the past. I won’t load up everything at once. I’ll load it a rate of a few a week. This way I can put on pictures from the now and the past and think of why each picture is loaded. I believe that thinking about the work is far better than just dumping in photographs and hoping for the best.

So without ado here are links to the first 3 pictures to benefit from this process – The Tropical Set.

The Island

Shadows of Fronds

Coconut