Close to Home – Eight Birds

It’s a common frustration ­- even a complaint – from photographers that the place they live in is not visually interesting, at least not interesting enough to build up a comprehensive body of  work. It’s a frustration I share myself, and for me the solution has always been to travel to more interesting and photogenic places.

Some photographers though are lucky enough to live somewhere with a wealth of potential subject matter close by. Marius Rustad is one of them. He lives in Norway, and his project Close to Home resulted in a series of beautiful black and white prints taken close to where he lives.

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Today the third eBook in my Magic of Black & White series goes on sale on Craft and Vision. It’s called The Magic of Black & White: Part III – Nine Photos and picks up where the second eBook (The Magic of Black & White: Part II – Craft) left off.

In this eBook I take you through nine black and white images with the intention of explaining the more advanced Photoshop* techniques behind them. I discuss toning, split toning, exposure blending, soft focus and the creation of diptyches and triptyches. But it’s not just about Photoshop technique. Photoshop is an essential part of the digital black and white photographer’s toolbox – but to be anything more than a technical exercise it needs to be aligned with creative vision.

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Summer Moon

What is fine art photography? The term covers a broad subject range – it seems that photographers working in just about any genre of photography can produce photos good enough to exhibit and sell to the fine art photography market.

Photography magazines sometimes take a different tack, and publish articles showing you to create black and white images, usually still lifes overlaid with textures, that you can put on your wall. But is this fine art, or merely an imitation of it?

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