It's way to early in the AM to be up and writing but I couldn't go to sleep without sharing these two photos from last year's trip to Las Vegas I worked up in Lightroom and Photoshop today. With a zillion things on my plate today I just needed to escape into some personal work today to clear my head. I'm taking tomorrow (err, later today) off to attend to a family situation and I just couldn't concentrate on business. Life is like that sometimes.
These photos were fun and challenging to construct. Even though they may seem pretty straightforward, each one required up to 20 layers to produce. There were TONS of curves adjustments, dodging, burning, cloning, and in the top photo I even moved mountains. Literally, I moved the bottom portion of the scene closer to the clouds. Better life thru Photoshop. But, and this is to me the key, after all that work on the computer, the photographs still look natural.
A creative director and friend told me a few weeks ago the reason she likes my work so much is that it never "looks digital." By that she meant the super sharp hyper reality high dynamic range images so often seen today. Oh don't get me wrong, I've done those too. But afterward they left me cold and empty. That's just me. I've seen examples where they look pretty cool, but I've seen more that just looked super sharp and hyper real with no emotion whatsoever. Call me old school but I want feeling in my images. I want someone to look at my photographs and feel like they are there, or could be there, seeing it as I did. But that's just me. Others have their own style, and that's cool, too. That's the beauty of photography. To each their own... vision.
Enjoy the first Wednesday of the new year. I'll be back in the saddle on Thursday.
Later.
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