I hope the influence of Mr. Jameson will not prevent me from doing justice to this rather deserving subject.
My poems and their illustrations are very closely related. In more than a few cases, the image was actually the inspiration for the text. Sometimes, of course, it's the other way around, but they are always related.
The first thing I would like to do is get the nudity thing out of the way. I am a reincarnationist (if that is a word--my spell-checker doesn't seem to think so). Because of this, I write from a realm not bound by time or space. How can I put myself in period costumes? The truest me is the unclothed one, which is also the most universal.
There, that wasn't so hard.
Some of you will have noticed an evolution in the photographic techniques involved in making my photographs. I've been an avid photographer for nearly fifty years, but things are different now. I can, to put it succinctly, do things that I could never have done before. I used to spend hours in the darkroom, and my work was meticulous and painstaking. Now, though, I have control that in those days I never had.
I am primarily a black-and-white photographer, as I always was. It is what I love. I shoot digital, in color, and in most cases I immediately the best pictures to black-and-white, gray-scale images. Because the response curve of a photocell is not the same as film or the human eye, I use software to increase the contrast, and then adjust the brightness to produce the kind of image I want. The result is a correct, gray-scale image, adjusted to my taste.
Lately, though, I put those "correct, gray-scale images" through an ultra-high-contrast process, to essentially convert them to something close to line art or a woodcut. The software gives me exquisite control, allowing me to get many different effects.
The advantages of this high-contrast process are many. First of all, since the images are similar to line art, they do not need to be half-toned for printing. This will be important if I ever want to produce a book (which I think I do).
The process also presents a quantum leap in the possibilities for self-expression, obviously of tremendous importance.
Lastly, the process can be used to protect my modesty (as if I had much of that!) and get the images past Facebook's censors.
The bottom line is that you're likely to see a whole lot more of those extremely-high-contrast images in this blog. I hope that you'll like them.
Text and image © 2018 by Donald C. Traxler.
