• Focused on photography

    Pleasures and pains of editing photographs

    The process of editing photographs can be pleasant and fulfilling but it can also be confusing and even intimidating. At least that is my experience and I want to talk about it today. Not to make the reading too dry, I’ll add a few of my before/after images. The before images are unprocessed RAW versions just transferred to JPEGs. Let’s make it clear from the beginning that for the purpose of this post, by editing I don’t mean adding textures, creating composites or making any major changes to the photograph’s contents (except for cropping and minor healing or cloning), just adjustment of light, saturation, contrast, white balance, etc. My first…

  • Plzeň
    Focused on photography

    The challenge of visualisation

    How important do you think visualisation is for one’s artistic work? I read in several articles that visualisation is vital to art and I thought about it many times. In dictionaries, visualisation is defined as “the act of forming a picture of somebody or something in your mind”. Does that mean that to create art you need to be able to imagine the picture of what you want to achieve? The final result? I believe there are painters who look at an empty canvas and see a masterpiece. I believe there are photographers who look at a model and see an artistic portrait. I believe there are sculptors who look…

  • Focused on photography

    Story of a badly taken photo

    Today I’d like to share with you something different than my still life images and that is a story of a badly taken photo and what it taught me. Unless you are always ready and prepared when holding your camera, you must have experienced a situation when you were shooting something and suddenly something else happened which you wanted to capture quickly and oops, you found out that you forgot to change the last camera’s settings which turned up to be utterly wrong for the desired capture and the moment was irretrievably lost. This is how I took the photo that you can see below, it’s straight out of the…

  • still-life
    Focused on photography

    How I created my still-life image of a faded rose

    There are plenty of photos and images on the Internet and some of their authors generously share the process of creating them, the how-to manual for getting the results they achieved. I love those “recipes” and I’m always eager to have a look behind the scene. It’s enriching in so many ways. The basic processing may be quite similar but when it comes to feelings and reasoning, it becomes personal and inspiring. I’d like to add my contribution to that shared knowledge by showing you the process of creating one of my recent still-life images. The reason why this image came into existence was the fading beauty of that rose.…