The Creative Process of Fine Art Photography

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Images should collaborate with your mind’s eye to show you the deeper meanings and emotions latent within them, immersing you in a world constructed by your imagination.

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And as with the text of a well-written story, the photographic medium should recede into the background as you are drawn into the richer world of the artist's vision.

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The Journey Begins

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Art and creativity are to life as the soul is to the body, as dreams are to sleep, and as perception is to consciousness. They provide a sense of wholeness as well as a means of realizing and connecting to an inner vision that would otherwise go unexpressed.

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Creating fine art takes significant time and effort. I have to find and capture the right location, subject, composition, and light, but that is only a portion of a lengthy creative process.

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Photography literally means drawing with light. My “light drawings” start with raw images captured with a camera, which derives its name from camera obscura, meaning dark chamber.

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The human eye is yet another camera obscura, with the cornea and lens, iris, and retina serving as the equivalents of the focusing element, aperture, and photosensor of the camera.

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Paralleling a digital camera sensor and its onboard image processor, the preprocessed data from the retina streams along the optic nerve for further complex processing by the visual cortex, which acts like a darkroom to turn the raw image data into the final perceived image.

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The visual cortex requires a mind to experience and react to the imagery that it creates. Unlike the static prints produced by the photographic process, the unfettered darkroom in our minds can take that imagery to another level when we use an artistic sensibility to transform it from a photocopy into a work of art.

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The Journey Begins Again

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In the digital realm I mimic this same process to enable you to experience the artistic vision of my mind's eye through my fine art prints.

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This is only possible because the beauty of a scene transcends the literal colors and shapes that embody its visual contents, much as a captivating story transcends the physical words and paragraphs used to convey an author’s imagination to the reader.