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Posts Tagged ‘digital’

I teach beginners digital photography and had a recent discussion with a student who has done extremely well and is now central to a new camera club being set up. He was finding that the role of club leader was reducing his shooting time and whilst rewarding it was not actually taking pictures.

This is a common problem.

If you have a creative drive and creative urges are high then you will naturally want to push yourself forward as hard as possible.  When you find yourself drawn in a direction that reduces your creative time, or when life intervenes to reduce the time available for your art then frustration is natural. After all a great artist once said that the best way improve yourself is to do something everyday. Unfortunately for many people this is difficult and leads to frustration.

Frustration is counter productive and needs to be avoided. A frustrated artist may end up dwelling on the negative or the impossible. It may lead to a paralysis of action. Not a good thing.

I have this problem too. Some times the work I do leads me away from the creative and I find myself wondering about what to do next.

I have found one answer to the problem. It is to float  in the wind. It is impossible to control everything that happens in life. What is in control however  is your attitude and ability to take advantage of opportunity. So what you need to do is not worry when life stops you from doing what you want. Relax, deal with one problem at a time and get back out there taking pictures as soon as you can. However just because you cannot go our with your best camera that should not stop you. These days most of us carry cameras in our phones. Take a moment out to quickly take a picture of things that catch your eye. This quick snapping will help you keep your eye in on composition.

So don’t make a chore out of things, don’t get stressed, snap away and when you can go out and do great work.

That way you can go on for years, ever improving your craft.

I’ve recently produced an abstract pattern and thought it might be interesting to run through the flow of events and processes that led to this particular piece being created.

It all started in on a Sunday afternoon on the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal when I spotted some catkins above my head. The weather was beautiful that day – with a clear blue sky, I took a

photograph using my mobile phone – sadly I didn’t have a good camera available (the battery was in need of a charge). However the final picture I felt was full of potential. So I took a little time to study it. That photograph is on the right. A favourite theme of mine is how the outstretched branches of trees can really look like the system blood vessels and veins in an animal.

Those thoughts got me thinking in sort of laterally fractally kind of way.

If trees can be like veins, and veins when abstracted can look like neurons and these patterns can sort of look like a map.

So plants can be like animals, can be like vascular systems can be like guides to the things we make.

How to show that in an image?

The Connects Pattern

My first step was to put the focus on the shape. That meant getting rid of the sky and simplifyingthings, taking everything right down to its minimum in Photoshop. That looked interesting but wasn’t enough of an image to capture the feeling I wanted. It was a start. I look the pattern I’d created and took a section from it and twisted its orientation onto a new layer in Photoshop. That looked better but was not complete. It was time for a bit of experimentation. Now I was painting with the the shapes in the photograph and I felt an abstract pattern starting to come together. The next step was to take a look at the colours. Taking my map thoughts as an inspiration; I took memories of the colours in the London underground map and started to apply these to the pattern. Things were going the way that  I wanted. It looked bit flat so I rendered in little bits of  lighting on odd parts of the picture.

The final result looked like a map that was bit off its head, a bit like prints of branches, a bit like paint splatter and a bit like something organic and living with odd bits of colour and detail that sort of stand out and make you raise an eyebrow. To me that says complex pattern and I think on reflection I’ve achieved that as I keep finding new shapes hiding in it.

I’ve also marked it up as a T shirt. There’s something slightly retro about this pattern as a T Shirt.