This will, hopefully, be the first of many entries on the subject of my digital art. In this first entry, I will describe how I go to this point. I do not have any formal art training, and I have spent the last 30 or so years absorbed in the world of gardening and plants. I had a well known garden {at least in gardening circles} on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, and many of the images you see on this site came from that garden. We sold that property a few years ago, and moved to Port Ludlow, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula where I am now making another, much smaller garden.
An Image from my garden on Bainbridge Island.
Naturally, as my garden developed, I wanted to photograph it myself and not rely on others to do that for me, so I took up photography. I started out using a film camera, but soon switched to digital, so I never really got invested in film the way some photographers I know were. And once I made the switch to digital, I began to want to create images like I saw in books and magazines, and I realized that I needed to learn Photoshop.
I view Photoshop as a tool by which the photographer develops the image. A digital image is, after all, just a collection of black and white dots or pixels which are then interpreted by a computer to create the image one actually sees. The difference between a 'straight out of the camera' image and one processed in Photoshop, is that in the former a computer program in the camera interprets those dots, while the photographer gets some say in how the dots are interpreted with Photoshop. Neither image is exactly how one actually sees the image, so neither image is 'real' in that sense, but I would argue that a good Photoshop job can capture 'reality' better than any straight out of the camera image.
So I undertook the long task of learning Photoshop, which I did eventually, although it took several years for me to get comfortable with the program. I learned it mainly by taking online courses and just by doing it. I find Photoshop to be a wonderful tool which enables me to achieve the vision that I see when I take a photograph. I am still learning new techniques in the program, and probably will never know it all. I will describe in my next blog entry how I came to digital painting.