Craig Stocks Arts Blog

Here’s another picture from my photo shoot by the cornfield on C Street last week. This version is much more abstract. In fact, it’s really about the colors and less about the corn, or even the sunset. The strong colors might lead you to think that there’s a lot of Photoshop involved, but there isn’t. In fact, most of the Photoshop work was technical in nature, cleaning up aberrations and artifacts that were caused by shooting directly into the sun.

I’m finding that my photography is more and more about color. I don’t have anything against black and white, and I’ve posted a few B&W images in the past, but it seems that most of my images don’t translate well into black and white since color is such a strong component. Maybe that’s a reaction to my early years where nearly all of my photography was black and white. At that time, color photography always seemed special. I liked it, but it wasn’t what I was doing, so it wasn’t particularly relevant.

The other problem I had with color was loss of control. I’ve done some color film and print processing, but it’s much more complex than black and white. In the film days, very few photographers did their own color processing, even though most black and white processing was done by the photographer. With black and white, I had complete control over processing and printing. With color, I had to turn over control to a lab, and it just wasn’t as satisfying.

Today, digital processes have changed that. Photographers now have complete control of their images, whether color or black and white. In fact, digital processes give us much more control than we ever had with wet processes in the darkroom. A lot of photographers have gravitated to black and white, but I seem to be moving more strongly toward making colors and important creative element in my photography.

I’ve written before about how I enjoy revisiting older images. The photo below is a good example. I took the photo three years ago, and even though I like the photo, I was never completely happy with the result. I can’t really say why I didn’t like it, but even after many hours of working on it Photoshop, I still wasn’t satisfied. Since I’m now in the middle of preparing for a couple of local shows in Central Illinois, I thought I’d revisit some of my local images.

A big advantage of digital is the ability to revisit older images and process them with newer technology, and technology has advanced quite a bit in the last three years. The new versions of Photoshop and Lightroom have all new processing versions, and I now have custom profiles for my cameras that yield richer and more accurate colors. Of course, I’m sure my own skills have advanced as well. The end result is that I was able to create a result that I’m happy with.

I also discovered a bonus during the process. As I was going through all of the images from the shoot I found the frame below where I’d zoomed in much tighter on the farm buildings in the distance. (The image above was shot with an extreme wide-angle 16mm lens, the one below was shot at 75mm, which is a short telephoto.)  About all I needed to do in Photoshop was crop the image into a panoramic format and adjust the brightness.