Manipulating images
I am a newbie to the wonderful world of image manipulation. So first of all I checked out some examples of what can be done with Photoshop and Gimp which are the go-to places to play with images. Click on the image below to take you to some great examples of Photoshop artwork.
I grew up learning to shoot stills on film and not knowing until you were in the darkroom what you had shot. And while there was always manipulation of images in the darkroom setting it is a massive change to a digital medium where anything is possible. I was interested in video artist, Tacita Dean’s take on this. In a recent article by Elissa Blake in The Age Dean discusses the fact that her chosen medium of film is nearly extinct. She mourned the disappearance of film saying:
I’m an artist and I court chance … sometimes you get a miracle. You can’t get miracles in digital.
I wonder if this is true. I certainly find in shooting digital stills or images there can be a moment you don’t expect, a bit of magic.
For me right now, the magic is getting a handle on making my images work online. Thanks to Gimp I’ve learned about scaling images and cropping, finding the best size for web publishing and what format to export in. I’ve also explored layers, colour range and effects. Here’s a few shots from a recent trip to Tassie, nice and small and scaled down to be web-friendly.
Tasmania turned on its best in February
sharedfragments 