One of my everlasting life long passions is to learn. And learning photography and the art of photography and how it merges into the art world is galaxy of opportunity.

It took the insightful words and inspiration of Art Wolfe in his Photography as Art Seminar which he is offering throughout the U.S.. Attending last year, this seminar opened my eyes, mind and heart in understanding how studying art and learning how to apply the concepts and building blocks to my photography would make a world of a difference.

And so my artistic journey truly began and I wasn’t sure where my path would lead me. In learning more about Impressionism, I was introduced to the idea of applying a description of feeling or another adjective to help describe or identify to yourself just what it is you’re feeling when you are capturing an image.

Now I must admit, I’m not quite that much introspective when I’m out in the field photographing, but I know I love being out in nature. I find magic in everything that I see. I feel the cold air brush against my face in winter and swelter in the summer heat. Our earth is special and the natural gifts that we take the time to discover is nothing short of…magic.

But perhaps I never truly understood just where my work was leading me to until someone introduced me to George Inness (May 1, 1825 – August 3, 1894) a prominent American landscape painter. In looking him up on Wikipedia, the way they described his work hit home for me.

“Although Inness’s style evolved through distinct stages over a prolific career that spanned more than forty years and 1,000 paintings, his works consistently earned acclaim for their powerful, coordinated efforts to elicit depth of mood, atmosphere, and emotion. Neither pure realist nor impressionist, Inness was a transitional figure who intended for his works to combine both the earthly and the ethereal in order to capture the complete essence of a locale. A master of light, color, and shadow, he became noted for creating highly ordered and complex scenes that often juxtaposed hazy or blurred elements with sharp and refined details to evoke an interweaving of both the physical and the spiritual nature of experience. In Inness’s words, he attempted through his art to demonstrate the “reality of the unseen”[1] and to connect the “visible upon the invisible.”[2]” Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Inness

By accident, my work has stumbled precisely into what George Inness accomplished in his work. Who knew that an artist truly resided within me.

And so if it can happen for me, it can certainly happen for you. It’s easy to get caught up into all the buttons and gadgets your camera has and it can distract you from what you’re really trying to do. Capture your world as you see it. And of course, taking the picture is just the first step. It’s what you do with your images when you come home in the Digital Darkroom that can have your images stand out from others. And you don’t need a fancy camera these days. The amount of creative editing Apps available for your smart phone or smart device is amazing.

Imagine…all of the images shown here were captured with my iPhone. Just think of what you can create!

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