Today, I had one of the most exciting mornings of my creative and photographic life: Andrew Koehler of Mac Nurse, and I spent the morning in Lightroom, my photo editing software,  mapping, and photo masking a black-and-white picture I took in Vermont last week.

My whole idea of the photo changed as we worked on it, I was mesmerized and exhilarated. It was a big moment for me.

Andrew is working with me to help me use AI and masking in Lightroom to fuse black and white with color and photography with painting.

It’s a coming together of things:  new AI software, my Leica camera, the surrender of my Canon,  the evolution of my Iphone camera (Pro Max 13), which is revolutionizing small frame photography.

The perfect photo editing software for me is LightRoom Classic. It took a while before I got comfortable with it, and I had a lot more work to do to understand what it could do.

For a while, I’ve been interested in photo painting, the fusion of art and painting and photography. But this is a big step beyond that.

For me, this is an entirely new form of art.

I still call this a photo painting, but I’ll need a new name for it.

Below is the original Leica black and white picture I took last while some woman on a farm screamed at me to get lost and stop taking pictures of her cows. I’m glad I didn’t listen to her (I thought she was yelling at her dogs.) That was the way she talked to me.

 

What is photo masking?

It’s the process of using a software “mask” to protect a specific area of an image, just as one would use masking tape when painting a room in your house.

This means changing one part of an image without changing all of it in English.

Masking an area of an image protects that area from being altered by changes made to the rest of the picture. It also permits the fusion of color photography with black and white, using each to bring a new and creative experience for the viewer and the photographer.

Beyond that, it allows new ways of contrast or tone mapping.

I’m eager to learn to use these tools and expand the range of my photography. (Tone Mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics. It maps one set of colors to another to approximate the appearance of high dynamic range images into a medium that traditionally has a limited dynamic range. In photography, dynamic range describes the ratio between the darkest and brightest color tones that a camera can capture in a single exposure.)

This feels like a creative revolution; I want a piece of it. I’ll never catch up with the experts, but I can go a lot farther than I have.

This won’t change the way I shoot most of my photos.

But it will surely change some of them.

On my blog, the photos have become as important as the words. That is how I feel about them.

I’ve come a long way. When I first started taking pictures, my editor called me up and asked me what the Hell I thought I was doing. “You’re writer, not a photographer,” he said, “your pictures look like bad Hallmark Cards.”

He had a point, but I had no intention of giving it up. I have always known I can’t let other people judge my potential.

When I started taking pictures  (I never touched a camera before that), it was mostly a matter of point-and-shoot. I just wanted to take cute photos of my dogs and animals; people loved those, so did my publisher. The camera did all of the thinking and most of the creativity. I just shot what I liked.

I never had to think about it. The reader got just what I saw.

Then I discovered that the images led me to a  new understanding of my life and the world beyond it. Photography changed the way I saw the world.

And it changed me, releasing some of the buried parts of me. It was both healing and challenging, something for me to work on and get better and better. I’m still working on that.

Photos don’t lie; they can’t. Neither can the photographer. He is his pictures.

People didn’t have to take my word for everything; they could see what I was seeing and feeling.

Even the best conspiracy theories can’t obliterate the power of what we see with our own eyes. Photography gave me credibility and made me work hard, to be honest. They didn’t threaten my writing; they supported it. Soon, every post had a photo attached. I called the images “my truth.”

I’ve lived to see a creative revolution in photography. The photo above illustrates the options of presenting images – and life itself – in a new way, a new perspective.

I don’t have to choose only between black and white and color; there are a lot of choices now in the middle.

This morning was a breakthrough for me. I was almost giddy with excitement. I felt like a kid getting his first guitar lessons. I’m not the first to do this by any means, but it is the most sophisticated photo editing I’ve yet attempted. And it is pure art for me. I expect there will be some more.

Andrew is a great teacher and is immensely skilled with the software of all kinds. He breaks down the walls for me.

He and I agreed to learn this new technology together, it’s a beautiful partnership, and he lives in Northeastern Vermont; I’ve never met him. He feels like a brother, but more like a son in age.

I could never have gotten this far without him. He and I will practice together several more times over the next few weeks, and then I’ll be off on my own, with occasional brush-ups. It might take me longer than a few weeks.

I’m working hard to get ready.

This photo was originally a soft black and white Leica shot of a farm with cows. I added a blue sky with a cloud and painted the barn red. To me, this combines the best of both photographic mediums – black and white and color.

Barns should be red, and skies should be blue. The cows, dairy cows, looked great in black and white. Each complements the other.

My idea was to capture both Leica’s powerful range and the color of traditional digital photography. I wouldn’t want to do this with all of my photos, or even most, but for me, this is creativity in its purest form. It took me more than an hour to get this sky right.

The software found the sky highlighted it, and kept the changes away from the rest of the photo, especially the cows.

My Canon five began this revolution for me, then the iPhones, then the Leica. The Leica has stirred the pot and got me moving and learning. It deserves the best I can do with it.

I  used a “brush” tool to pain the barns. That took is precisely like painting with a brush and paint. You have to be careful and go slowly.

This final image blew my mind; I called Maria in her studio and said she needed to come over here and see what we had done. “Is everything all right?” she asked, worried. “Everything is great,” I said.

For me, this is very gripping stuff, learning to do something as creative and new as this. Many people my age have given up the ghost and headed for their condos in Florida to ride out the winter and the rest of their lives.

It might be a good choice for them, but I’ll die first, or maybe freeze to death.

So here we are, sharing this new adventure. I appreciate all of your encouragement, and thank you for coming along. I’m just getting started.

I was told to stay out of the cold today, and mostly, I did. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t work hard.