Izdihar - Magic Kingdom Escapology

Some of my images recently have probably been just slightly outside the norm of what I've been doing for the last thirty-ish years. When I started into the realms of photography, I was heavily influenced by the likes of Ansel Adams - I still like his stuff very much now, that hasn't changed. Over recent months though, I've started to view that type of huge DoF*, ultra sharp style as being rather more documentary than I currently feel comfortable with.

As I browse around flickr from time to time and elsewhere, I find myself drawn increasingly to something rather more elusive. Call it style, call it individuality, call it art, call it none of those. Whatever it is though, I'm beginning to look for something that I can best describe as wanting to capture the sense of time and a place, something that taps into whatever emotion was present when the shutter button was pushed. Anyone wanting to understand where this comes from and what inspired this shift, could do worse than go and look up Aeric Meridith-Goujon, be warned though, what you find may well need to come with the health warning NSFW** - proceed with caution. Whilst I've no intention of photographing the same types of subject as Aeric, the style in evidence draws me in every time. If you wish to look at something rather more office friendly, take a look at some of Joannablu's images; the link is over there --> somewhere. Now she has a real knack of turning the everyday stuff into a kind of dream world that evokes old memories.

I've also been increasingly posting material with the majority of the colour stripped out and replaced with a hint of sepia***, though I'm sure someone will tell me that's not quite what it is. This I think is more of a visual reference to some of the current aspects of my own life that I'm less than comfortable with. Inevitably, though this will change. I need to get out and take some newer material too - the archives are currently being ransacked heavily and probably much too often to make any safe claim of keeping the standards up.

I may come back to this sometime soon, in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the show...

* Depth of Field
** Not Safe For Work
*** Convert to B&W via method of choice, select colorize from Hue/Saturation, set Hue to 45 & Saturation at 8-10, dodge & burn to taste, or maybe just adjust with the Curves tool - in my case done with PS CS4