Redux
July 21, 2023
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Summer in Washington, D.C. is my least favorite season, it’s hot, it’s humid, it drains my energy. In fact, I try to escape the swamp - and no, I am not using that term politically - for at least a month every year. Because I have a low tolerance for this weather, I don’t often get out to take photographs. The good news for me at least, is that I will be traveling in August to an undisclosed location that averages temperatures in the low 70s. I hope to create a plethora of dynamic images to share with you.
Why “Redux?” I was delving into some features in Photoshop that I hadn’t worked with before. As I had no new material specifically for this purpose, I revisited select photos used in my book. The book was in color, so of course, I wanted to convert the images to monochrome. I also wanted to give the photographs more of an ethereal quality. In most situations photographers want their work to be tack sharp so this approach is counter intuitive. In the following four images I used a technique that diffuses the image, just enough to give it a bit of a glow.
This next series mimics selective focus, highlighting a sharp area in the photo by throwing the rest of it into soft focus.
The diffused images resemble to some degree the photography of the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Peter Allen used to sing “Everything old is new again.”