I’m sure everyone looks forward to greeting them in flickr!
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| Matt Laur's Evening Stroll on Piazza Bra (photo.net) |
Speaking of communities, if you are interested in a fine
photographic community, you will not go far wrong with photo.net. They have a quality photo gallery,
highly-informative forums, and a wealth of easy-to-read articles on various
techniques.
How often have you heard the comment, “Yeah. But it’s been photoshopped.”
As if using the digital darkroom suddenly made photographic
images less valuable.
Of course, since you did the lesson on The Digital Sensor,
you can tell your friends that digital sensors respond to about 70% of incident
light while film only captures about 2%, making digital photography awesomely
more powerful than chemical-based film.
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| Photoshopped? Not at all. |
So let me introduce you to a man who made compound
images long before anyone even dreamed of Photoshop.
Like you, Jerry Uelsmann became interested in photography in
high school. And over time his
wonderful graphic imagination and his passion for sharing his images led him to
achieve advanced university degrees and a teaching job at the University of
Florida!
These images (and you can look at his other work here) were
all composed of multiple negatives, stacked then manipulated in the “wet”
darkroom with as many as ten enlargers at once. There is nothing faintly digital about these images – except
that they’ve been scanned to get them here.
Uelsmann’s art has been called allegorical and it has been
said he turns his subjects into symbols of something else entirely.
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| Uelsmann made composite images before Photoshop. |
The woman looking from the reflection of the mountain scene
almost forces us to re-think the image and ponder it. Such intriguing power!
Next time someone says, “Yeah, but it’s Photoshopped,” you
might be able to help them look to the full meaning of the image.
