Wishing you all a wonderful, healthy, prosperous, creative, joyful, loving 2021. Wrap your arms around the new year, and I wish we all can wrap our arms around loved ones and friends a lot more than in 2020!
We are getting close to Christmas. A feast of hope and light. In times like we live in now it is even more important to celebrate the unbearable lightness of being.
The B4 retouch series I browsed my archive for pictures to publish. All of them are not completely retouched yet. Scratches, dust and stains are not removed.
The picture was scanned from negative and tweaked using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a larger version
The B4 retouch series I browsed my archive for pictures to publish. All of them are not completely retouched yet. Scratches, dust and stains are not removed.
The picture was scanned from negative and tweaked using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a larger version.
The B4 retouch series I browsed my archive for pictures to publish. All of them are not completely retouched yet. Scratches, dust and stains are not removed.
The picture was scanned from negative and tweaked using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a larger version.
Autumn has come, Summer is over. The garden is no longer the place to enjoy being outside during the pandemic, looking at plants and flowers. Seasons come and go, the natural cycle continues, and Summer is waiting to come back next year, hopefully in a different setting without restrictions.
The canal that runs through my village is always an inspiration. Each season has its new perspective. The image is a bit shaky, using the zoom on the iPhone.
The term ‘negative space’ to me is confusion: technically it is the space around the main subject of a photo. It means ‘negative’ as opposed to ‘positive’ attention for the main subject. The word ‘negative’ as a noun brings back good old memories. Being older I actually worked and work with negatives (for the millennials: it has to do with film, the light sensitive stuff we used to put in a camera to get a photo on (in negative) that later could be printed (in positive).
So ‘negative space’ is about the focus a viewer of a photo is offered in a photo. If there is a lot to see around the subject, than that distracts from that subject. In other words: it is a creative tool a photographer can use.
In The Netherlands, lock down started in March this year. For me the biggest impact was the obligation to stay in or close around the house. I hate talking about ‘normal’ or the ‘new normal’ but all of a sudden I was not on my bicycle twice a day to the station to take the train to commute to work. And hence my ‘spontaneous inspiration’ diminished for taking photos on my iPhone. Luckily the garden was a real treat in colors, flowers, sun (we just exit the heatwave), and still is. The biggest ‘creativity’ was doing DIY in and around the house. The DIY shops thrived during the lock down, everybody got working on projects.
So, how creative am I during times of Covid? I am still the same person in looking at objects; the world I can physically see however is smaller. Lock down is lifted gradually, so my world is growing again. But this limitation led me to see much more detail and up close, and wonder about the smaller things in life that are important, which I took for granted or did not give attention before. Which helps me to be patient, and support people who keep us going forward (care staff, hospital staff, scientists and even the government and all others who keep the country going). Challenging, but not impossible. Balancing, experiencing the unknown.