I have been involved in various aspects of photography for the better part of five decades. My involvement has included gallery and museum exhibitions, overseeing and implementing commercial applications including all the various flavors of color and black and white wet darkroom work with prints and film, building a professional drum scanning, digital retouching, copy work etc. I have never lost my enthusiasm for making personally expressive images. I always enjoyed the daily work involving professional commercial clients looking for a good way to get their favored images onto a printed page. For me, one of the benefits of this arrangement has been that it forced me to strongly consider the clients expectations of how the image would print rather than being guided by what my tastes indicated. Essentially, my clients paid me to do daily exercises involving all aspects of the production environment.
I have worked on a number of projects in the last 6 or 7 years. Each had its own criteria concerning the look and feel of the finished image collection. Typically, I am working on a number of projects at once. I know I am finished with the project when it begins to feel like new images are becoming repetitive or I am satisfied that I no longer am interested.
As I gather raw material for other ongoing projects I occasionally come across a basic landscape that strikes a chord in me so I put into my collection of raw images in spite of the fact that it doesn't really fit with any ongoing project. Here are some of the results.
I cannot remember the last time I started with a raw image and considered it a finished work without a significant amount of modification. Typically, nature has given me a basic architecture to work with but there are always elements that need changing. For example, a corner needs darkening, a color needs to become more or less saturated or maybe changed a bit, contrast in an area may need to be increased or decreased, etc. The purpose of the changes i make to the image are based on a desire to have all of the picture elements balanced out so the image surface looks and feels cohesive and of interest. Don't want any dead spots in the picture. While working at this stage I am generally not looking at the content of the original scene so much as I am looking at the way the formal elements are fitting together. Content is pretty much fixed at the time of exposure but the coherent picture is made afterwards, these days with a computer.