When is a photograph not a photograph?
I have no plans to answer that question, nor do I have any inkling as to how one might do so. I'm not a professional photographer. I've not studied art. I barely know how to use the post-processing software (Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop) I use to process images I take with my Fuji X-T2 mirrorless camera. I have taken 15,000 images over the past 5 years, of these I would say I am proud of a dozen or so photographs. I know what I like. But what I like is continually changing.A few years ago I was enamored with panoramic photos. I have also gone through several waterfall phases. Living where I used to (the mountains of West Virginia) I chased colors in the fall and thought they were marvelous, until I fell in love with the soft pastels of springtime. I guess you could say I'm fickle.
Most recently I have been messing around with a piece of software produced by Topaz Labs. It allows me to create "photos" with a more painted-like (painterly) quality. Case in point the images in this post. Awhile back I went for a hike in the noontime sun, a horrible time to take pictures. Harsh contrasts. Overblown highlights. Muted colors. I took the color picture above to capture an image of the bright white peak on the horizon that I was pretty sure was Glacier Peak in the eastern Cascades. The noontime sun and haze washed out its details so I tried processing the image as a black & white photo. Better I thought. Then I transformed it using some of the Topaz software. Realistic? Not quite. Representative of what I saw? Absolutely. The painterly version is more representative of my memory from that day than either of the other two photos. So when is a photograph not a photograph?
Honestly, I don't know or care. But I do know I like the top image - at least for now.
