Drawn to Nature

Camera Work.

Like everyone else who remembers the bad old days of the twelve shot roll of Kodak film, I compensate for the trauma of those times by taking endless numbers of photos, all the while trusting that one or two of them might be worth something.

My wife is a graphic designer, and so by the grace of God I have access to the latest and greatest version of Adobe Photoshop. A day gets put aside now and then in order to download all the photos from the phone and the DSLR, and cull the 95% that are worthless.

Once I have some photos worth fooling with, I make duplicates of them. First I tweak the exposure and make the other necessary fixes. Sometimes I go further and adjust things so much that the picture becomes a kind of first round study for the final painting. When things go wrong, the original is still there to start over with.

Once I have something worthwhile I send it to my wife’s laser printer. I let Photoshop manage the color and print on simple HP 90g paper. For whatever reason, it often turns out I need to make the photo on the Mac much lighter than I want, or the picture prints too dark. This is where the “save as” option comes in handy: I still have the version with the right color to refer to, and call it up on the computer screen when necessary.