The Red Door

This is my idea of a fine art image though I am probably merely deluded and jaded at that. After all, what makes art, art? It is highly subjective. For me it is the ability to take a common, mundane object or setting and lift it to the level of magnificent. Keep in mind that photography was not actually considered art for many years. All other art forms are brought forth from the ground up solely by the internal vision of the artist. A photographer, on the other hand, works with objects that already exist in their own right. He merely presents them in the best possible way. To be artistic a photographer has to somehow abstract the subject by various means so that the resulting image is no mere record of what was actually seen. Otherwise all you have is a snapshot, no matter how skilled you are with the technical aspects of photography. This is why people fall in love so easily with monochrome. By removing the element of color, everything is automatically abstracted because we normally do see everything in color. The production of art is now more easily accomplished. I worked with black and white film for decades before I decided to try my hand at color. I still love it, but when I turned to color a few years ago I was astonished at how difficult it suddenly was to make an interesting image. I’m still learning as you can see, but I love the challenge! Cheers.

Done