Wild Flower Meadow 2 – to suggest is to create

I am getting the hang of colour photography now, the inoculations really helped!

I was asked by Fat Man if my mono photography has gone?

Below is my reply to his question.

Mono hasn’t gone its just that I have found ways to explore colour. I’ve had Color Efex Pro for years and never opened it, when I did, I found it worked completely differently to Silver Efex. So I left it. Then I watched a not very good Color Efex tutorial on YouTube recently and thought this isn’t so scary after all. At the same time I found a Lensbaby Zone plate adapter that I had forgotten about that gives soft glow in the highlights.

So I combined the softness and glow with film grain. This combination reminded me of a book called “By the sea” by Robert Farber done in the 80’s with Agfa 1000 ASA film.

There is no such thing as a new idea in photography only combining and adapting old ideas.

Then I did some proof prints to replicate the size of the Agfa 1000 film grain. So its a work in progress at the moment. The idea was to take a couple of thousand pictures and may produce up to 20 A2 prints as part of talks and training courses.

The point is that these pictures are interpretations – I have taken over 500 pictures in three different locations hand held with shutter speed of around  1/2 sec – sharpness is very over-rated. But sharpness can be controlled if you have the vision and craft to make your own pictures and not take what the camera gives you.

If you want to learn how to take control of your camera before you press the button see the ABC of CameraWork course on my website.

A big hello to all the new followers of my blog this week.

(c) Andy Beel FRPS 2014

http://www.andybeelfrps.co.uk