Individuality

February 14, 2015 by lauramacky 114 Comments

A professional photographer once told me that a perfectly balanced picture is nice but it’s merely a “record” of what happened and is not necessarily artistic nor shows individuality.  Now some of you may disagree with that statement and I’m sorry if I made you cringe lol, but that statement has always struck me.

A very crisp picture can be stunning as they are, however, what did I see there really?  Trying to go a bit deeper with my editing process allows me to bring out the emotion I felt when I took the picture.  I think I’ve mentioned this before but I guess I’m trying to reinforce it in my own mind so I think it’s worth saying again.

Here I’ve revamped the original seagull shot which was a decent shot to begin with, but how many gulls on a rock have we seen?  I know I’ve seen a million of them.  But what did I REALLY see….I saw a lone gull on a rock that was visited many times before him.  His bright orange beak and his pinkish feet stood out to me when I saw him standing there.  I thought about how the life of a seagull might be difficult out in the ocean which then drove me to make the ocean darker and more foreboding, and it also added contrast to the seagull’s white body.   His pose also felt like it was “just for me” as he nonchalantly stood there waiting for me to snap the photo.  I chose to use a painterly effect because I’m rather enjoying those lately as you probably can tell.  😉

It also helped that this post is about being unique and that the gull was alone on the rock, hence the title “Individuality”.  Kind of sums up the post in a way, eh?

Western Gull