Hello, this is my first Blog creation hoping to present photographers considerations for creating photographic art. There are several very important considerations to be made for planning what your final images will become. Importantly you first need to decide who your image will be of interest to and what message if any you may wish to convey.

In some cases you may just want to simply create exciting unique decorative wall art to share with others to enhance their appreciation for the beauty of life by showing different ways of seeing and  looking at any target subject. Originality is a big consideration so you look at the composition and evaluate.

Considerations include: is the subject actually an image of someone else's art work be it a sculpture, statue, architectural  structure, a painting or an image that someone else has created?

If you answer yes then you may want to reconsider because such subject matter in essence contradicts originality. Yet, if you are significantly changing the image you are creating a new improvisation from that subject that will be very significantly different in visual appearance and or the mood it creates. So with camera settings, lighting natural or technical, filters and effects the appearance can be drastically changed and thus, more so lends to originality in the way that you as an artist see and visualize the subject.

In some cases buildings and other structures are present but they are ancillary with the main subject being totally different. We have to consider that nature creates many different flowers, botanicals, fruits, vegetables, environments and life forms so are we just documenting those or are we creating a different unique way of seeing and visualizing those and changing the way that those subjects are seen in our images.

If nature creates many unique variations to some extent so does human kind in the great variety of designs of objects, buildings, landscapes as well. It is then that a photographic artist may utilize abstraction methods to change the images dramatically to somehow convey some aspect of beauty, mood, appreciation, and expressions of emotions into the images and in some cases to downplay certain aspects of the image while increasing the focus of other aspects.

A good example are images of water reflections of objects and how the liquid ripples and translucency may also show objects under the water added to the reflection image almost as if a double or multiple exposure would attempt to achieve.

Composition is a combination of where the subject objects are physically, the lighting, the camera angle, the type of camera lens, the use of changes in lens aperture settings used for controlling depth of field, and what will be rendered in sharp focus and what will be rendered out of focus for the intention of de-emphasizing some of the elements of the image. Also, there are optional use of lens filters, adjustments of the shutter speed and  ISO recording speed of film speed and film types that affect the rendering of an image. 

Once the image is captured then either in photo darkroom processing or increasingly by use of computer photo editing softwares the photographic artist has many additional controls and effects that can be applied to the recorded images.

PC Computer photo-editors have been in use for decades and earlier ones had a one time purchase price for the licensed software. As with many softwares now many are now only available by paid subscriptions. Newer photo editors have increased capabilities and some include optional artificial intelligence AI functionalities.

AI functions are primarily for seeing what effects can be applied to the image and can present a multitude of possibilities to the photographer all at the same time that help speed up the consideration many different effects and the comparisons of the effects on the mood and ambiance they wish to convey.

The majority of the effects available with AI photo editors were already well known established effects previously available in non AI software programs and alike those often can be applied to varying effects and intensities.

Therefore, AI and non-AI photo editors provide the photographer with a greatly improved larger pallet of image enhancements and modifications.

Neal H. Wright

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