Many of my friends on Facebook groups and in real life, not that FB isn’t real life, have encouraged me to show more of my wildlife pictures via the blog so people who are not connected through FB can enjoy the pictures too. Thank all of you who have requested this.

With that in mind, I’m going to start posting a series of photos that I’ve taken and transformed into  them into a base for of personally “artistic expression” images to share in the blog.

Photographic artists come in a couple “flavors”, newbies, amateur, and professional.  And there are many different “dialects” of communication with each photographer/artist.

For most of my life I’ve been what’s considered as a “realist” photographer. I started in the television industry as a teenager and worked directly with optics and technology on the highest order of quality. I wanted and strived to produce the clearest, most accurate images that technology and money could offer.

Since I used to design and build television stations and video production facilities I was able to use someone else’s funds. But it was my job to produce and send very accurate images 100% of the time. As a video engineer in the early years of HD video I was even a voting member of the HD group that eventually decided on the HD specs for television recording and broadcast, yes, I’m a nerd.

I “was” a realist nerd when it came to images though. Impressionistic art was not only foreign but awkward and out of my personal spec range, it was flawed, it was fuzzy, many times it felt like I was looking through a pair of old ladies silk stockings when I looked at impression art pieces. I’ve learned that the images don’t have to be unrecognizable blobs to be called impressionistic.

So, when I got real serious about capturing wildlife images I did whatever it took to capture the clearest images possible. That’s a good thing. On the other hand I also noticed that my pictures of great blue herons looked identical to the ones captured by the photographer standing right next to me with, basically, the same camera gear. We both captured super clear, anatomically correct, color correct, sharp and technically perfect, text-book images. There is nothing wrong with that but I wanted more, I wanted different. I wanted something special.

I want a picture that people look at and, not only recognize the subject, but feel the subject. I want the picture to draw the viewer into the scene and make the viewer one with the image. I want the viewer to, as they look at the picture, hear music and feel like they are engulfed in the scene. I want viewers to think to themselves, “I’ve never seen it that way before”.

There is more in this series to come in the next few weeks. I’ll even expose how I process the images and why I choose certain processes.
Jon-Mark