News

PAINTING WITH LIGHT

30/09/2018
A new gallery added to my website
Photography is a medium that is totally dependent upon the interaction between light and a photosensitive matrix. The image produced is more or less a faithful representation of the scene that the camera records. Sometimes it seems that this realism of photography can run counter to artistic expression – it is as if the precision of the detail distracts the eye from taking in the emotional mood that the photographer experienced at the time of taking the photograph.

The great masters of photography have long learned to use techniques such as composition or tonal variations in light and shade (chiaroscuro) to try and subvert the merely representational and evoke moods and emotional responses in their photographs. In the digital age of photography such ‘artistic’ approaches have become technically easier to achieve.

My favoured approach over recent years is to try and alter the realism of an image at the time of taking the photograph using in-camera manipulation. This can take the form of intentional camera movement (ICM) and/or superimposing consecutive exposures into a single image in the camera (multi-exposure photography, MEP). The images in the new gallery are mostly taken using ICM and MEP to try and produce impressionistic views of the moods of landscape, mostly seascapes.