120 - Ania in White

120 - Ania in White
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This for me confirmed in my mind that the most important facet of the information my camera captures for me is composition, with some form of consistency of light. Colour and focus are nice, but not essential.

This means that my choice of digital camera is based upon number of pixels, the ability to zoom (until I learn how to fly), the size of the memory and, significantly, the quality of being carryable - especially since I have arthritis and thus lugging around excess weight wherever I go is undesirable.

I have occasionally played around with a function in Gimp which allows you to select a specific part of the dark and light in an image, so that once can choose to dump part of the light/dark information and let them become white or black. I used it here because I could in a single step eradicate much of the background and parts of the central vertical part of the image. Basically, I can play around with where I want the contrast to work in a single step, followed by a little minor editing of anything it missed.

It made a pleasant change not to have to worry about colour, even the continuity of focus across the various elements of the image could safely be ignored. It was rather like pushing paint around on a canvas.

This then begs the question of what is the difference between photography and painting? Could it be as simple that in one you have to learn how to draw? Composition is a matter of being able to recognize an idea and capturing it with camera or pencil, and then perhaps combining elements from different sources, mixing them up as required. More to the point, is the difference down to the choice of manual skill - drawing and mixing paint versus sliding pixels around?

I know there is a temptation to define an artist by their ability to draw and apply paint, but I know many people who can copy other people's work or render a scene in paint, and what they produce is reproduction and not a lot of art. I even know of artists who direct others to do the actual manual production of pieces under their watchful eye.

Art, I would say, occurs in the mind - the ability to compose, to have an idea and be able to visualise that idea in another medium.

This image is a series of ideas, which I then realized through my choice of equipment and practised manual skills. The idea changed as I forced it through the limitations and what manual skills and equipment I have, a kind of feedback loop that I used to generate new ideas and insights.