Portrait Wedding Photographers: New creative imaging

Hello and welcome to my Blog, so glad you are here, I hope you will find the content interesting and I would love to hear your comments, on this, or any other article.

Todays blog is about creativity. Creativity in photography. At College I was very impressed by the work of Jerry Uelsmann. The work he carried out in the dark room was simply breath taking, not to mention inspirational. The beauty of it is that in today computer age, images like Jerrys are much simpler to achieve. Bringing originality, now that is the hard part.

So where to start? Well I took three shots from previous portrait shoots and just decided to "play" with them. If you have time you too can create images like these on your computer.

What I was tring to achieve was an image where the subject was still recognisable, but adding in some creative art to make the empty spaces of the photographs more intersting. The techniques used were similar in all 3 images. The starting image was enhanced by removing spots and wrinkles, the eyes were brightened a touch. The Liquify filter was used to modify body shape to create balance, rather than Barbie doll prerfection. Next, the background was placed OVER the image and its opacity reduced. Then the erase tool was used to remove areas of the background that were not needed.

I must remind you that these are only practice images, but do you think there is any merit in persuing this line? Do you think there is a market out there for photographs that are more creative in nature. Of course there is also an added cost to these images. If you can imagine the amount of time that would go into producing such an image, all that time and skill of the graphic artist has to be accounted for.

With the profusion of digital cameras everyone and their Grandma has hard-drives full to bursting with photographs. Ok, not all will reach the standards of an "award winning" master photographer, but some will be ok, and all will tell a story. I wanted to step to the side of portrait photography, look at it from a different angle and bring in a dollop of artistry. Add some creative graphics, a marriage of photography and digital art.

Here is my final image, the one I spent most time on. I hope you like it. Bear in mind that this image looses a lot of its quality, being dramatically downsized for the web.