Finals

James Martin
Untitled
My inspiration for this body of work comes from my love of landscapes and of being in the (of) the landscape. I enjoy being outdoors and so enjoy photography as an extension of my daily life…
I am drawn to photography at night, the ability to draw ambient light from what appears dark and empty is always intriguing to me. The colors that are present in night images always surprise me, deep, rich and sometimes vibrant, they convey a much different feel, as does the process of creating the images. I know going in that I will spend much more time per image. This allows me to explore the process much more intimately. I’ve learned while creating this body of work that preparation and research can be as important as vision when working in outdoor environments, especially at night. Weather, moon phase, location, light pollution and proper attire can all be the difference between getting the images and coming home empty handed.
I live in a rural area surrounded by both large urban areas and sparsely populated areas. This affords me opportunities to vary my surrounding easily, creating skyline images of large cities and unpopulated landscapes in the same day. I am drawn to the brightly lit skylines and bridges of the Bay Area, these images both cold and bright, filled with color, light and dark shadow, are challenging to create.
I’m still struggling with the technical aspects of night photography, the process form data to paper seems to be much more difficult than color printing for me. The standard correction techniques, levels, curves, exposure can create some unwanted effects with very dark areas. Printing to matte paper seems to present some issues as well that I hope to resolve with different paper types and inksets. Formatting for web display at high resolution has its problems also which I hope to resolve by converting to PNG.
I would like the viewer to draw from this body of work His/Her own feelings and ideas. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

These image were corrected several  ways, exposure,contrst curves and color corrections were done on the daytime images. Many of the images has fliter effects added to bring colors out and color balace was used extensively, ecpecially on the night images. Cloning stamp was used to varinig degrees on omage that had distracting fore ground issues or unseen powerlines etc. Cant wait for 151