Travel Photos Debut

Landscape, flower, and travel photos reportedly don't attract attention on photo websites. Everybody and his Chinese uncle now own a digital camera and posting photos on ever larger free Internet sites.

After successfully printing model photos on the Pixma Pro9000, I am rediscovering why I liked photography initially. Commercial value is not why I was drawn to photography. Even if this activity does not turn a dollar, there is no denying the pleasure it brings me. This is its more intrinsic value to me.
At lunch with Tony today I expounded on the two directions I want to explore in digital photography. The reason why digital and not film photography is not just that taking photographs is now affordable so amateurs like me learn the basic nuts and bolts of photography; it is also that digitized images allow the pixels to be manipulated.

Now I have never cared for overdone Photoshop-altered photographs. I don't even like the modern graphic layout styles of British magazines. I tend towards the severely traditional in art as in photography. Still I have found myself in places I never thought I'd go so I don't adhere too tightly to what I want. I'd like to see how altering hues and contrasts could do to either change the story an image is telling or enhance some feeling it evokes in the viewer. I have always loved color photographs but admit an almost religious awe of black-and-white and sepia photography. To me this is why reading a book is still often a more powerful experience than watching a movie. The paucity of stimuli allows my own imagination to paint the canvas in a way that seduces me into creative delight.

I also never wanted to print my images. I started out with a digital camera after I discovered the joy of film photography was in the snapping of the images. I liked composing the scenes or find some element of the 360° panorama that tells the story or tells its own story different even than the larger picture. But I am rediscovering how printing a photograph provides access to the beautiful on another level. The texture of the paper, the size and shape of it, adds a dimension to the image that I am just discovering can be powerful. A 5x7" photograph might be good as a memory aid to something we have viewed before but when the image is blown up to 16x 30 or the size of a wall in the room, it moves to a whole new way of appreciating the image.

For now, here two images from the trip to Southern Italy last May.