Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Art

Photography is Human
Photography is a human activity. It is by humans and for humans. Why else would anything you call art be done?
By humans
Photography is a uniquely human product, as is all art. Humans have an innate desire to record and to express. We preserve memories or pour out what we feel or even just want to make something “pretty” or significant.
No other creature feels a need to produce lasting works of visual art.
I do not believe it is just because we have opposable thumbs or have mastered tool making. It is much deeper than that.There is something we feel and have to express. We want to leave some record of our passage through this life.
And this is a near universal, spontaneous need. It just comes out because we are human.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
For humans
Who do we create art for? Isn’t it always and only for humans?
There is no need to make a large landscape mural for your dog. He will not appreciate it. He may be your best friend, even almost a surrogate child, but he won’t even notice the art you created for him.
But don’t assume quantity of views is a valid measure of worth, or that we have failed unless we have public showings attracting large numbers of people. I am an example of that. I have had showings, but I am clear that my main audience is myself. That is, ultimately, I am the one who gets to approve my art. But, then, I am a human. My art is for humans.
I believe you can have a rewarding satisfaction of being an artist even if you only show your work to a select set of friends. The value of our art should not be measured in the amount of publicity we get or the number of collectors holding our work.
I love it when other people see my work. Some are even kind enough to make encouraging comments. That is a kind of connection and validation. It feels good since it comes from humans.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Uniquely human
Humans create art for other humans. We are the only creatures who can value or even recognize it. Unlike your dog, people can be touched by an image. Viewing it can translate to multiple feelings and emotions in another human.
Animals don’t create art. Fish don’t either. Only humans. We have a need to create.
If we visited some tribes making cave art in France 20,000 years ago and asked them why they did it, what do you think they would say? I doubt they would say they were decorating the cave so that when they moved out and a bear moved in, it would be happier. No, they would probably just say they felt a need to create and to record events and to establish aspirational goals for younger people to follow. And because they liked it. That is human.
Whenever we live and wherever we go we feel the need to paint on our walls.
The largest AI model might, with good prompts, make a picture that would be acceptable for some uses. But it could never step back and look at it with satisfaction and think “Wow, i like that”.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Not just taking pictures
To be clear, I am only talking about photography intended to be art. What is often called fine art photography. There are other kinds.
I guess that most of the photographic images captured daily are taken by machines. Try to picture the vast amount of automatically captured imagery. Police surveillance cameras on every corner, speed cameras, security cameras on every business and house, dash cams, body cams, Google Street View captures. More than we can probably imagine.
There must be millions of hours of video and millions of still images captured by robots every day. However, none of those robots are emotionally attached to the images. The machines did not feel excitement or sadness or awe when they “looked” at any of the frames. They did not feel anything. And the machines did not take the images with the goal of causing happiness or warmth or longing or any other emotion in human viewers.
Those automatically captured images are not art, and they are not for humans, really. Some may be used by humans for a particular purpose, but none of it is printed and framed and hung on their wall to be called art.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
First, live life
Before we are artists, we are humans. In life we experience joy and success and sadness and loss. We grow from these experiences. Our values and life views develop. It gives us a point of view. Sharing this point of view is called art.
Don’t photograph just to be technically perfect. That is shallow and dead. Photography is a beautifully technical craft. Technical skill is required to make an interesting image, but it does not by itself make an image great. Machines can do technical perfection.
Don’t photograph to “make art”. That is a false goal. Photography is a perfectly valid art form. However, if we don’t have anything to say, we will say that. Make images that are art because you are an artist and have feelings or a view that you want to share with your viewers.
Photography that is art comes from life. Living and experiencing is something only a human can do. Don’t give up your humanity to machines or algorithms. Live the life only you can live. Be who only you can be. Let it come through in your images.
It’s not about metrics or hits or any other numbers. It is about you seeing and expressing something and being able to help other people to see and feel it too.
Postscript
Steven Levy of Wired Magazine recently gave the Commencement talk at Temple University. A topic on graduates minds is will they lose their jobs to AI. Steven addressed this and had what I consider an insightful observation.
In his conclusion he said “The lords of AI are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make their models think LIKE accomplished humans. You have just spent four years at Temple University learning to think AS accomplished humans. The difference is immeasurable.”
You are a human. Art is a human activity. Only you can make art.
April 30, 2025
Photography is Art
In my last post, I made the point that photography is all about technology. This time I argue that photography is art. The technology is just a tool.
I do not consider this at all inconsistent.
Photography is more technical
I hope I made the point in my previous post that photography is based on technology. This seems a clear truth. But all art is.
Have you ever been through the process of creating a bronze sculpture? Wow. It is fascinating. And complex. Most of the technology is “old” by our current view, but it is there in depth.
And painting is heavily based on materials research and technology improvements. Finding or creating, purifying and blending pigments is a specialized technology. The manufacture and treatment of substrates to paint on has improved greatly over the years. Even a seemingly little thing like oil paints becoming available in tubes changed a lot of the practice of the art. Renoir once said “Without paint in tubes there would have been… nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionists.”
But although all art is based on technology to some degree, photography is one of the most extreme. And it is strongly reliant on what we think of a “modern” technology, which makes it more visible to us.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Technology serves art
I ended the previous article with a strong suggestion that technology needs to serve our needs, not the other way around. Photography is art that uses technology. Technology does not – or at least should not – make art.
We sometimes loose sight of that. Using the technology can become an overriding concern. I really like the old saying “When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it is easy to forget that the goal was to drain the swamp.”
Wrestling with all that equipment can occasionally become so intense a focus on its own that we forget the goal of what we are trying to do.
But we have to overcome that. Technology is just a tool to use to create our art.
Technology cannot make creative decisions
Art is a work of human creativity. It involves novelty and non-obvious expression. Novelty and expression must come from a personal, human point of view. Technology cannot do that.
I believe one reason photography is sometimes looked down on by more “serious” artists is that it seems too easy. It appears to be mechanically done. They will say “You just walked up to that tree, pointed your camera, and made a picture. There is no art in that.”
If that is what we did, maybe they have a good argument.
But if we did bring novelty and non-obvious expression, isn’t that art? Just as much as any other art form? Did the camera make the picture or was it the decisions the photographer made that created it?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
My camera makes some important technical decisions for me and with my permission. For instance, I usually shoot in aperture priority mode. I select the aperture and the camera chooses a good shutter speed for the combination of aperture and ISO sensitivity I am using. Even so, I often override its choice by using exposure compensation. So which one of us made the picture?
I did. It was made by my direction. Saying otherwise would be like arguing that you didn’t actually drive to work today because your car’s computers controlled everything. No, I do not understand the details of the design of my car, but I know how to direct it to do what I want.
We produce art
The artist makes the decision of where to view the scene, what to frame, the perspective, the lighting, the exposure, the “moment”. All of it works to capture the feeling or emotion in the photographer’s mind.
Once all the relevant decisions are make, it is up to the technology to do its part to support the creative decisions. I have never let my camera decide, on its on, to take a picture.
This becomes more of an issue as AI intrudes on art. But perfect AI – which we are far from – could only ever create images with a bland sameness. Decent representations, but not creative or exceptional.
New art, good art, will only be created by humans. And only by humans who overcome the seduction of technology for its own sake. Who, rather, apply their creativity to showing us new things, new points of view, new applications of techniques. Humans can show us what they felt.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Rise above
Billions of people carry decent cameras with them every day. They take trillions of images every year. That does not destroy photography. If anything, it helps people to recognize what is exceptional.
Great images, ones that are novel and creative and emotive and well executed, rise above the noise of the average. They obviously were not created by technology, even if they were created with technology. In a world where all images are good, the exceptional still stands out.
As artists with a camera, we must always realize that we are responsible for all creative decisions in our image, from the conceptualization to the final print. We are responsible for the entire frame and everything that appears there. And we have an increasing responsibility to more forcefully apply our innate creativity and point of view to our images. If for no other reason than to prove we are human.
We learn. We improve. Our vision changes and grows. Our ability is refined with study and practice. But it is only through showing our humanity that we become artists instead of people who take pictures.
Technology is good. It can help us make art. Do not confuse technology with art.
April 23, 2025
Be The 1%
We can choose to be the 1% of photographers. Those who make prints. A print is a special thing with it’s own life.
The 1%
I’m not talking about that 1% we hear talked about – the richest people in the world or the country. The latest data I could find for the USA says that, on average across the country, to be in the 1% you need a salary of about $600,000 or a net worth of $11 Million. Another article said that 1% of the people in the world own over 50% of the total household wealth.
I am not bringing this up to get into any discussion of income inequality, investing practices, demographics, or anything related to that.
No, I am referring to a group of photographers we can easily choose to join. Peter Eastway speculates that only about 1% of photographers make prints. Why do you think we don’t print more?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
What is a print?
First, what do I mean by a print? This may seem obvious, but I want to make sure we are on the same page, so to speak.
By a print I am referring to an image presented in a physical medium. A print is an object with weight and space and presence. We can hold it and touch it. We perceive it with our physical senses. And it is “permanent”. That is, it persists unchanged over time.
A print is an enduring expression of the artist’s intent at the time. I say at the time, because it is quite possible for my intent to change with time. Today’s print may be quite different from one of the same image file 10 years ago. I can come to see it different. That is natural. I am the artist.
What is a print not? It is not an image on a screen. Not your computer monitor or a iPad or your phone. It is not a fleeting image scrolled by on social media.
Screens are important in the production of our art, but they should not be the goal. Psychologically, we know that what we see on a screen is ephemeral. It has no permanence. We discount it easily.
Why a print?
A print is tangible and persistent. It is an artifact in its own right. That is, it is physical. It is an object. We can hand it off to a client who buys it and it becomes their possession.
By giving the print this life of its own, we are creating a new piece of art. It is no longer under the control of the artist. Kind of like a child growing up and going out on their own. They are your family, but they have their own life now.
As the artist, I can no longer “huddle over it” and protect and explain it. It is on its own. Now it is hanging on a wall. Maybe in someone’s home. Maybe in a gallery. But no matter where, it is now perceived for itself in isolation. It has to explain itself, fend for itself.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
What does it do to our thought process?
Deciding to make a print changes our perception of what we are doing.
For one thing, we have to commit our interpretation of what we see or feel in the image. Once we make the print, we can’t come back next week and change it. If we do, it becomes a different piece of art.
And we will go through a more stringent selection process to pick it. Out of my thousands of good images, why print this one? Does it do a better job of representing my view on the subject? Is it a more perceptive representation of something I feel? Will this give my viewers more insight than the thousands of other images I could have picked? Is this an image I will hand to the world and say “this is me?”
And making a print involves new creative decisions. What size should it be? Some images seem to call to be large while others seem to prefer being small. Should this be a paper print or canvas or metal or acrylic? Will it look best as glossy or matte? Sure, some of the decisions will be dictated by the intended application. But many are purely artistic.
And there are technical considerations that come in now. Can I print it and mount it myself or must I send it out to a service bureau to be done? The selected media imposes constraints on the image itself. If the desired effect is soft and ethereal then a matte finish may be best. But if the image relies on sharp detail a glossy substrate will make that pop more.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Technical considerations
Creating a good print is a specialized process that requires some detailed knowledge. The fundamental problem is one of basic physics. Screens generate light and emit it. It is an RGB mix and it is additive. That is, red + green makes orange.
We see prints by reflected light. Light hits the surface of the print and what bounces back is what we see. It is a subtractive process. The ink absorbs some colors. We see the reflected light that is not absorbed. To make less red you add cyan. Cyan is the opposite of red. More cyan absorbing red means less red reflected.
This fundamental difference means that a print will never look exactly like the image on screen. How close we can come is one of the challenges. How close we need to come is an artistic judgment.
One barrier I hit a lot is color gamut limitations. Print media generally has a smaller color range than our computer monitors. It probably has a smaller range than the color space we are working in. No physical media can print the whole ProPhoto RGB space, for instance.
Editing the image for printing is a task on it’s own. We load profiles for the media and printer and inks that we are using. A special profiling view is switched on so we see a simulation of what the final print will look like. This is, at best, a fair but not exact model. The reality is it may require several rounds of test prints and re-edits to get to a final print we like.
It can be a lot of work, but it is part of the artistic process. This is work we have to do to “birth” the print as its own entity.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Viewing it
We have gone through all of this work and expense to create a print. Why? Was it worth it?
This is a personal evaluation.
Sometimes you are disappointed with the result. Some images just do not seem to print well. That could mean we did not choose the best medium or size.
But most of the time you will feel the satisfaction of creating something new. Because the print is a new work of art. It is a distinct physical object with a life of its own. It lives in the world and is evaluated by viewers.
We did our best job of composition and subject selection and lighting and a host of other things. We edited it carefully and prepared it for printing. Now it passes into another realm. We have tried to guide the viewers to see what we saw, but now they are on their own to discover it.
The child leaves home and starts its own life. We are proud of it, but we cannot control it. It is not ours anymore. The viewers evaluate it on its own independently.
Something tugged their interest enough to take a look at it. Maybe we can draw them in and take them on a journey they did not anticipate. That is joy for the artist and the viewer.
Take the leap. Be one of the 1% of photographers who make prints. It can change your art. And it can be a legacy.
April 9, 2025
Too Many Photographs?
Do you shoot too many photographs? Can we shoot too many? I think this is a question we can only answer individually. A lot of it depends on why we are shooting.
Easy to do
We are blessed with amazing digital technology that allows us to frame and compose and take photos rapidly. And some of our cameras can vacuum up 20 or more images a second if we want to. Memory cards are so large now that we can keep stuffing images into them for days and days.
This is one of the things I love about photography compared to other arts. The way I shoot is usually spontaneous. See it – take it. Maybe think about it some and try some alternate compositions. Maybe.
Working like this fits my personality. I have shot for so many years that much of the thought process of composition, exposure, etc. is subconscious.
But a downside of this is that it is easy to shoot a lot of frames. Sometimes more than I ever intended.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Travel
One of those times when we take many more images than usual is when we travel. Everything seems new and different and special. We are compelled to shoot. And we do.
On a recent 3 week trip to France I shot over 4000 images. And I think I am rather disciplined. I know people who take many thousands more images than me on a trip.
This is not a problem, unless it becomes one for us. It is fun and exciting. A benefit of traveling as a photographer is to take new and interesting images. We reward ourselves by putting our self in a “target rich” environment with our photography equipment.
We seem to give ourselves permission to take more pictures when traveling. I don’t know why. We should feel total permission all the time.
Projects
Another thing that seems to generate a lot of images is a project. Assigning our self a theme or topic to focus on for a time can be energizing. Directing our attention can stimulate new energy and creativity.
But it takes a lot of great candidate images to put together a story line and a few excellent selects for the final portfolio. When we focus on a project we suddenly see opportunities in places we never dreamed. That can lead to a lot of shots.
There aren’t any metrics that matter for something like this. But for something to discuss, I figure that to get to a final set of 20 images for a project I need maybe 100-200 strong images that do a great job of representing the theme. To get to those strong selects may require hundreds of attempts. And this is for 1 short term project.
I have some long term projects that I have accumulated a thousand or more candidate images for. And counting.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Arguments against
It seems to me that the arguments against shooting a lot of images come down to 2 things: cost and time.
It is said that shooting digital images is free. This is not true. If you care about treating your images as an important asset, they have to be managed and curated. This is an overhead expense we have to consider.
Cost
Disk space is getting pretty cheap, but that is offset by the quantity we require. I have an obscene amount of disk space. My main image storage is a 20TByte RAID disk. It is roughly half full. In addition, I am a fanatic about backup. A Time Machine backup runs every hour incrementally backing up to an external hard disk. In addition, I have another large network RAID disk for backup plus yet another external drive. These get complete backups of my images and Lightroom catalog every night.
And once a week I run a backup that I keep offsite for more safety.
Rotating magnetic drives wear out and have to be replaced. I have a stack of bad ones waiting for me to get into a mood to smash with a sledge hammer. I almost got there this week.
This setup is definitely not cheap and has to be managed.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Time
But that is “just” money. There is another hidden cost that sneaks up on us.
It takes a tremendous amount of time to load, examine, cull, sort, tag, and file all these images. And then the promising ones require a lot of editing. This can add up to a major time investment.
Without a disciplined approach to managing our images, we basically end up with a “shoe box” full of pictures. A very large shoe box where is is almost impossible to locate an image we have in mind. How do we search for candidates for a project if we have 10’s of thousands of random files on the computer but no organization system?
I spend more time selecting and filing and editing than I do shooting. And I shoot almost every day.
I consider this a major unaccounted cost of shooting. The cost is in time. Time that we cannot apply to more creative parts of our art.
Learning/growing
Have I convinced you to shoot less? I hope not. That is not my goal.
I believe the benefits of shooting a lot outweigh the costs. I just believe in being upfront about the costs so we can make an informed decision.
For one thing, improving requires a lot of practice to hone and refine our skills. Our vision will only develop over time as we come to understand what we like and are drawn to.
Cartier-Bresson said your first 10,000 photos are the worst. I think that is true, but it does not mean your next 10,000 photos will be great. Just better. It takes a lot of practice.
Photography is a combination of art and craft. Both of those improve with practice. but only if we are honestly evaluating our work. Be your own worst critic.
Linus Pauling said “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.” I think this applies to photography as well. Are all of your shots keepers? I hope not. If they are, you are not out on the edge pushing yourself to try new things.
Shoot a lot, experiment, do foolish things that probably will not work. Who knows? That is one way discoveries are made. And it can be a lot of fun.
Why
But most fundamentally, why are you shooting? Is it to make money? Is it to get likes on social media?
Know what your goals are. I cannot criticize your goals. That is your personal choice.
I can say I have come to understand that in my life, my goal in making pictures is the joy of creating something that gives me pleasure. The satisfaction of being creative and creating something I consider beautiful or interesting. Selling prints is welcome and a pleasant validation, but not my driving motivation.
I am my main audience. If other people like my work, that is nice and it makes me feel good. But if they hate it, I will still create for myself. If I like my images, I am still being successful, even if everybody else dislikes them.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
No
So no, I’m not shooting too many photographs. They are for me. You will see few of them, so you do not care how many I shoot.
I shoot when I travel. I shoot for projects. Just walking around my hometown gives me all the reason I need to shoot something interesting. Something that no one else was likely to see in the same way.
My art is an important creative outlet in my life. It keeps me young (relatively). Art makes me think and keep a mindful attitude in the world around me. It feeds my curiosity.
This is worth it to me despite the cost and time involved in keeping up with it. Whether I shoot many or few images does not matter. What matters to me is the art I am able to create and the satisfaction I get from it.
I sincerely hope you are able to get as much joy from your work.
April 2, 2025
The Color Is…
Color is one of the major considerations in our photo processing. And it can be hard. Have you ever considered how many tools and settings there are to control color in Lightroom and Photoshop?
But where are you on the color concern spectrum? For you, is color:
1. Critical. It must exactly match
2. Important
3. An annoyance
4. Just a design variable
5. Don’t care
Why do we need to change it?
Despite all of the great technology we have, color is still an imprecise and slippery thing to deal with. Different camera manufacturers often create their own unique ‘look”. Fuji, for instance, has profiles built in for some of their famous films (remember Velvia?). But because of different technology and processing tradeoffs, there are subtle differences between, say, Nikon and Canon. There are even small variations between samples of the same camera model,
The color variations are magnified as we move further along the processing chain. What we see is greatly influenced by the decision to shoot RAW or JPEG, and if JPEG, what color balance is chosen. And is our monitor calibrated to ensure it correctly represents the colors in the digital file?
Finally, when we make a print everything can change drastically. The print is strongly influenced by the paper we choose and the printer’s ink set. Using good profiles for the printer and paper combination helps to produce an output that is “similar” to what we edited on screen, but it will never be the same. Just the move from illuminated pixels in RGB space to reflected light from a paper substrate in CMYK space means they can never be exactly the same. The physics is completely different.
The variations along the way are the process of color correcting the image.
Most of us do not see or pay much attention to these differences. The importance to us depends on our application.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Tools
The color correction tool chain starts back in our camera. Specifically, the color balance setting.
The color of the light on our scene varies greatly in different conditions. Bright sunlight is completely different from open shade, as is a cloudy, overcast day. Indoors under tungsten or fluorescent lighting and. even LED’s give different color casts.
Out eye/brain automatically adjusts for most of these differences, but the camera does not. The color balance setting in the camera is a means to dial out the color casts. But this is only useful for JPEG images and the preview we see in camera. Color balance has no effect on RAW images. Those compensations are made in our image editing software.
My camera stays set to Auto White Balance. I only shoot RAW, so it has little effect on my processing or results.
Lightroom
When I say “Lightroom” that is a shorthand for “Lightroom Classic”. That is the only version I care about. But I”m pretty sure everything I say about it applies to both applications. There are differences in color representations in other RAW image processors like Capture One, but I do not have enough experience with them to say much.
Lightroom is packed full of ways to change the color of our image. In the Develop module you are never far from something that can modify color.
Some of the controls change color globally, that is, for the whole image. Just scanning down from top to bottom (I think my controls are still in the default order), we start with profile. This can be a simple selection of default balance or you can set any of the many provided color effects, including black & white toning.
Next there is the white balance adjustment to allow us to adapt the image to a color that should be neutral. Next to that is the color balance selection to partially compensate for lighting conditions.
Right under them is the Temp and Tint sliders. Vibrance and saturation do not actually alter colors much, but they have a strong effect on the look of colors.
Then there is the Tone Curve, where we can adjust red, green, and blue channel properties directly, followed by Color Mixer and Color Grading. Finally there is the Calibration group where we can control hue and saturation of each channel.
All of these are only the control that affect the whole image. We have many of the same controls to perform selective adjust color in regions (like a linear gradient) or spots (e.g the brush tool).
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Partly driven by the application
Hopefully, you get the impression that Lightroom gives us a lot of control of color. It must be important. I won’t even go into Photoshop with its many adjustments. I trust the point is made. This is not a “how to”.
Color adjustment is a large part of what we may deal with in post processing.
Maybe.
It depends on our application and needs.
If you are doing product photography, the customer is very concerned that the color of their logo or product absolutely matches their specification. Portrait customers have a fairly narrow tolerance for off colors in people’s faces. Or you may have a self-imposed rule that the final color must exactly match the original scene.
In these cases you are probably using gray cards or Color Checker swatches to ensure you faithfully match the original. You may even be calibrating your camera to minimize discrepancies. You will probably be using many of these Lightroom controls to adjust the colors to balance out shifts or color casts.
I’m a Fine Art Photographer
But I’m a Fine Art Photographer. I dislike that term and I’m not completely sure what it means, but I do know that what I create is art. Art is not tied to a real scene. Maybe someday I will get into a discussion on indexicality, but not today. By my definition, anything I want to do as art is acceptable.
I may not care at all about the color of the original scene. I’m certainly not fanatical about matching it or balancing color casts. My consideration is how the resulting image looks (to me) and what effect it has for the viewers.
Yet I do use most of the color controls I listed earlier. Except I very rarely use Calibrarion to adjust color, but that’s just me and my thought process. All the other controls, in global and regional and spots, are tools I use frequently.
Color is a subtle thing. Almost imperceptible shifts can create large perceived changes. It can be tricky, or impossible, to achieve an effect I have in mind. But I try.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Not an absolute
Breaking the assumption that my image must look like the original was difficult for me. Coming from a very technical, engineering background made me think in absolutes. Precision was important. But now that the assumption is broken, it is freeing. The realities I started with no longer hinder my vision (as much).
Even so, I do not usually create comic book-like pop art. Unless I want to for some reason. But, on the other hand, I do often enjoy making images that are so extreme you will think I modified them too much, even if I did little at all.
Sometimes color is the subject. Sometimes an image “needs” to be a different color than the original. An extreme use of color modification is black & white. Yes, taking away all color and just leaving tonality is extreme color manipulation.
In the questions I posed at the start, I’m usually operating at about 4 or 5. It is a tool I can apply to accomplish my vision. Not something I am stuck with because that’s what the original was.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Do what you need to do
Color perception is one aspect of a visual image. But it is a powerful one. With our technology, we are blessed with extreme ability to control or modify color. Don’t be afraid to use it creatively.
Unless you are working in an application that demands absolute fidelity to the original, color becomes just another design element to be used for art.
Make your art. The color is… what you need it to be.
Today’s feature image
Is this the “right” color? I don’t know. First, I didn’t have a gray card with me. Second, even if I did, I couldn’t have held it out the window at 40,000 ft. Third and most important, I don’t care.
This is what I remember seeing at the time. It is the way I chose to make the image look. It is art. I like it like that.
March 26, 2025