Going Their Way

A bit of street photography

The term “street photography” has come to mean artful and novel presentation of candid, everyday life. It can take us long distances in place and time. It tells stories of days long past, of people far and near. Done well, it takes the viewer right into the places and  the lives pictured by the photographer.

By no means do I call myself a street photographer, that specialty and skill requires dedication and hard work, and is a field all its own. But in capturing the world around me, I do find that some of my photos and some of my “café art”  is at least reminiscent of street photography.

Going through my archives, I recently noticed that some of my images have people turned away from the camera. The identity of the individuals is lost, but their actions, their places, their destinations tell clear stories. The viewer does not meet these folks, cannot interact with them over place and time, does not step into their lives, but unobtrusive joins them in their journeys, as they are “going their way”.

My friends know that I like to bring images to life by manipulating the lines, forms, and colors. My café art simplifies and emphasizes, takes artistic liberties, and is playful. Some of these scenes are presented here as café art. In some images time and place is removed or obscured, they leave the destination and environment to the imagination of the viewer.

Each picture when clicked takes you to this collection on my OneDrive. You can see the images larger, even as a slide show. Just look for the links when you move your pointer around.

Thank you for going my way!

.:.

© 2015 Ludwig Keck

Old Bottles

The use of glass bottles goes back millennia. Archeologists having been digging up old glass forever. I felt like one of then as I was rummaging through my photo archives recently. Back in 2009 I had visited Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia and gotten over a hundred photos. Three of then show old bottles in a display case. Here they are as they came out of the camera, full frame and without any post-processing.

As you can see, the first two are a rather bland, the right end bottle in the first, and the left end bottle in the second photo lean unpleasantly. Neither photo shows good composition. The third photo has more colorful bottles, but they really are grouped with too much space between the pairs. This third photo, however, made the cut for further processing and the other two images sank into the depths of my archives.

Indeed the “painterly” processing, and especially moving the bottles closer, made this a nice image. Back in September of 2011 it became part of my first “café art” collection, introducing that term in my post Café Art. It even made it to the cover of my first “café art” booklet on Shutterfly.

One little thing in the image kept bothering me, that front edge of the glass shelf at the bottom, mostly at the left of the picture. So when I had a bit of idle time on my hand I revisited the image. Here is my more recent effort. The bottles are not moved together as closely to maintain a wider aspect ratio. The image is less “posterized” looking.

But back to my archeological dig. Microsoft recently updated Image Composite Editor and when I saw those to old neglected exposures the idea occurred to me that stitched together the resulting composition would be quite nice, especially with some perspective correction so the leaning bottles would not be a distraction.

The resulting image turned out better than I expected.

In fact, I liked it enough to add it to my portfolio at Fine Art America. Why yes, that does give you a chance to add a genuine Ludwig to your art collection .

.:.

© 2015 Ludwig Keck