Creating Artistic Landscape Photographs Part 1: Flare is Beautiful

Seek not perfection for you can never reach it. -Salvador Dali

Flare is Beautiful
1 - Introduction: constructing images
I construct images. This is what I do. I don’t just capture raw photographs, process them and convert them. I alter them, warp them, and reformat them. I change their color palette, I dramatically modify their contrast and I use every digital means available to me to make them look the way I want them to look. I like to joke that I do unspeakable things to them. Except I am not joking. For me these things are not unspeakable. They are enjoyable, liberating even. But for those who continue to follow a strict film paradigm, a rigid way of processing images that is limited to adjusting color and contrast, the things I do -are- unspeakable. However for me, for someone who was never happy with the limitations that film imposed on my creativity, for someone who was trained as a painter and did not understand why shapes and colors couldn’t be molded to my desire instead...