Photographer’s Eye

My daughter called from BestBuy in her hometown. She was camera shopping. As in her first serious look at cameras beyond her iPhone.

Me, I would research and compare and agonize and second-guess and anguish over such a decision. Not her. She walked in, looked around, called when she had narrowed it down to two, and went with the one that felt better in her hands: a newly-released Nikon P500. She especially liked the 35x zoom, which will come in handy in her area where landscapes stretch for tens of miles towards the distant horizon.

Tomorrow (with her permission) I’ll post a going-to-work shot she sent from last week. It served the same purpose for her that wildflowers in Gatlinburg did for me in 1970: you need a real camera to take images that the photographer and not the camera has full control of.

Above, a wonderfully dilapidated old structure on a friend’s property, a building that was once a goat shed, its weathered board and rusting roof so rooted in place it has become a part of the local landscape and natural setting. Obviously, it has had a bit of painterly rendering in Photoshop, specifically with the benefit of a plug-in called Pixel Bender: free, for Adobe PS 5 users.

It takes no particular talent, beyond having an eye for the final rendering and some knowledge of the right tools, to create a “painted” landscape. It seems a bit like cheating. But this way of visioning the natural and manmade world expands my in-sight of the beauty in the ordinary. I can see the finished painting in the every-day scenes and objects;  my imagination holds the brush, and memory becomes the palette. I delight in projecting the painter’s potentials even when I lack the skills to use them in the traditional ways.