20 - First Snow, No Cheating



November could not have come with more cruel precision. Yesterday rain, today snow. Tomorrow?

I have hardly treated this image in Photoshop. Honestly, I tried. For instance there is this cable. I really wanted it to finish in the corner. No problem, rotating and scaling the image up did the trick, but somehow it did not work for me. I felt like cheating.

Funny, isn’t it? I don’t feel that way when it comes to color correction, I have no problem cloning something out, I see Photoshop with all its possibilities as part of my workflow, but rotating to let a line finish in the corner should be not OK?

Maybe it is, because those lines have become something of a trademark for me, and because producing them in-camera is real work. It is hard to do it, it feels good after I’ve done it. In Photoshop it is so incredibly easy, but, of course, it gives no satisfaction at all.

In a way all this is against my firm conviction that art is the product, not the process, but convictions are one thing, feelings are another. Maybe there is not always a last word to be spoken …

What this is? It’s a windshield reflecting a house, with snowflakes on it, focused on the reflection.


There are 1 comments

Ted Byrne   (2006-11-11)

The artist, as opposed to the audience,experiences a special rush, unique only to him. That's what the process is all about. Performing artists can be observed doing it, but even there, the audience cannot know what is happening as the artist goes from nothing to something. Photoshop is a tool analagous to a clarinet, a tu-tu, a paint brush, a fountain pen, or a hunk of clay. Tools and materials allow the artists to enter the process... it's very good of them to do that. It's the process, even more than the product, which keeps so many of us coming back.

Odd though, when's the last time you heard anyone saying, nice job Ad... you give good process?

Great work... love the cable...

Ted

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