June 1st, 2005
In the previous essay in this series I addressed Why attend a workshop? and published a letter emailed by Howard Warren. Today I am publishing another email I received from Martin McLeish, April 2005 Antelope Canyon workshop participant. Just like the previous essay, this is a must read if you are considering attending one of our workshops. As you read it note how these two entries -Reflections on Photography and Art-5 and 6- are related.
From: martinmcleish
Subject: photography
To: alain@beautiful-landscape.com
Alain,
A strange thing has happened. Whilst on the course, and when I returned home, I thought that I had got little out of the time we spent around Page itself, tending to think of Antelope canyon as the overwhelming highlight. Since reading your articles concerning weather and photography, the photographs that you published (Lemons and Lemonade), and also the email you received from Howard Warren, I revisited my file 'Around Page' and realised that it was not just a set of dowdy images, but could be rescued.
I then found that I was returning more and more to this file, and have been doing some intermittant work on them. I think that I have learned a lot from this experience - mainly about the necessity to do more post processing. I have always been of the 'pure photography' school and had been expecting works of art to come straight out of the camera! It is another lesson that I can put down to your influence.
Although my pictures are not finished - I need to study them from a compositional point of view and make decisions - I have been working on the colour aspect. I put some on my site at:
http://www.martinsphotosite.com/northamerica/chapter5/
and at
http://www.martinsphotosite.com/NorthAmerica/Chapter10/
These have been developed from the JPEGS that my camera takes alongside the RAW: I just have not had time to deal appropriately with the RAW files but hope to be able to return to it all soon.
Thanks again Alain. I do find Beautiful-landscape.com to be very educational as well as inpirational.
Regards
Martin
June 16th, 2005
Marting sent the following comments over email and I decided to post them here as they are very relevant:
From:martinmcleish
Subject: Re: FW: photography
To: "Alain Briot" alain@beautiful-landscape.com
Alain
I was discussing the whole issue with my sister who observed that, when you talk of "seeing" a photograph - which is one of the main tenents of your photography - you include the "seeing" of the possibilities even after the original capture is made. I think this is right - that the final piece of work is not just the capture, but the processing of the image, cropping, and all those other things which we can now do on the computer.
We felt that few photographers would have come up with the photograph "Sunflower Sunset", which adorns your home page today, and that there is a particular quality to your use of flowers, plants and grasses in your compositions which comes from your background in fine art.
Thank you, again, very much.
Martin
