Express & Star

Photographic art

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I took some photos on Sunday and I've been doing some editing to try to create something artistic.

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There are people who think photography can't be art because it's too easy. I don't believe that snapshots are art, but when you take some trouble to compose a shot and then edit it to produce a desirable image, then I would class this as photographic art.

Hydes Pool in Autumn

[breakout title="Mike Maynard" align="right"]Mike is a photographer and blogger, and key contributor to the Express & Star's Star Witness section! He runs two blogs of his own Mike10613 and A Zillion Ideas.[/breakout]

Autumnal colours have long inspired artists like Turner and Constable with the myriad of tones from dark greens to yellow. I used programmed auto to shoot these pictures and capture the colour. It isn't a setting I normally use, I usually prefer manual or aperture priority, but I seem to have got good results.

Hydes Pool in Autumn

This picture shows how warm the light was in late afternoon. It's an interesting picture, but I got more unusual effects by shooting towards the sun. You can try this yourself, you don't need an expensive camera and the editing software is free. I edit with Windows Live Gallery for basic editing and then I use Photoscape for the more artistic edits. You can do a lot with Photoscape and it's a free download. Just experiment and there is an 'undo' button if you don't like a particular effect.

Hydes Pool in Autumn

I used the coloured pencil drawing option in PhotoScape to create this image and it seems to work. I think this picture would be suitable for printing and framing. I would have preferred this array of colour to be a backdrop to a subject. A person or an object in the foreground would have made the image so much more interesting. What do you think?

You can see the original post on Mike's blog A Zillion Ideas. Click here to view it.