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I was 'into' photography about 30 years ago when my wife bought me a Praktica SLR in a desperate attempt to get me to do something that didn't involve reading a book. (This is the camera used with all my scanned images.) After an early flourish (and after reading lots of books), and after working through the 'everything-has-to-have-a-graduated-filter' stage, the camera started to gather dust. Life took over. The children grew up.

I am now working to live rather than living to work, and the arrival of digital has inspired me to start taking photographs again. I'm still getting to know my cameras (Olympus E500, Olympus Stylus mju 1000, Sony Ericsson Cybershot Phone K800i, Apple iPhones 3G, 4), but I must admit that the existence of digital images and Photoshop has taken much of the pressure of 'getting it perfect in the camera' away, making shooting much less stressful, and making the creative process extend for ages at home.

I want to create images that have meaning for me, that move or visually excite me in some way. I am not ashamed to admit that some of my images are heavily 'post-processed'. I came across a statement about art recently that can best sum up what I believe I am trying to do when creating a photograph. When written below it may appear more pompous than I intend, but it does seem to say what I think I am trying to do.

"The power of art is the power of the unsettling surprise. Even when it seems imitative, art doesn't so much duplicate the familiarity of the seen world as replace it with a reality of its own. Its mission, beyond the delivery of beauty is the disruption of the banal ... and it generates an alternative kind of vision: a dramatized kind of seeing." (Simon Schama, 2006, THE POWER OF ART, BBC Books).



I think that in my best pictures I am trying to recreate what I felt and imagined, rather than just capture what I saw. Or, as Leo Tolstoy said: ""Art is not a handicraft. It is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced."


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And when not on Flickr, or blogging, I do occasionally work for a living. See details about my Company and HERE and HERE. You can find out more about me at James Rye.





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