It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I love surrealism. I like surreal films, TV shows, images, paintings, literature, music and quite anything that has a surreal theme. Surreal art has always caught my attention and a lot of inspiration for my images comes from it. I guess surrealism bleeds through some of my images that have a mysterious and strange atmosphere just like dreams sometimes bleed through reality. My best known images have a hint of the surreal in them and I think it’s one of the things that draws people to them, or should I say into them.
Surreal forest scene with tree shining at night
It’s a no-brainer that one of my favorite TV shows is Twin Peaks. It’s resurrection and the first episodes got me in the mood for surrealism so I came up with some images to reflect on that. They fall in the surreal and fine art category, much like my Dark Dreams series. I think they would make for great prints, or backdrops for imagination, passages for the mind into other realms. They are mainly strange experiments that have materialized into something more coherent.
Old tree with long branches in scary forest at night
Waterfall in wild fantasy valley with magical light
A couple of days ago I was editing the photo above and I wanted to give it a magical look to make the viewer “feel” as much of what I have felt the moment I took this photo. I also remembered about the whole “purists” vs “editors” war with some going as far as saying that the goal of editing a photo is to make an image look as if it hasn’t been edited.
For me this is not true. I edit my photos to make them have a special atmosphere or to make them transmit something more accurate to what I felt or had in mind when I took the photo.
It’s not that the camera doesn’t render correctly what I see, but there are a lot of other stimuli (like the wind blowing, the sound of water, the sweet smell of the vegetation in the air, etc) that don’t get trough the camera. I use post editing to make an image more vivid or to make its atmosphere a certain way. I know that some might say that the image becomes something “unreal”, but an enhancement of certain features in an image makes it more real and closer to what I saw and felt that moment.
I remember that when I took this photo I wanted to have as much as possible in focus, on the whole length of the waterfall and river that makes the eye travel trough the whole frame, from the rocks in the foreground up to the sunspot above. A dog that stayed with us that whole day stayed still for a couple of seconds, just enough to appear in the frame so I felt that it’s a nice touch to give the photo a sense of greatness. I used a 5 seconds exposure time at ISO 100 to emphasize the flowing of the river and f/11 aperture to have everything in focus. When editing it I added a subtle glow and made the rocks a bit more cold in color temperature and the sunspot above a little bit warmer to replicate the contrast between the dark cold valley and the sun shining above. It made the whole scene closer to what I wanted it to be, to what I saw and felt that day. Hope you enjoy the image. I also made it available on my Stocksy United portfolio under the “Wild fairy tale landscape with waterfall in the woods” name.
For me editing means getting access to a digital darkroom. The process is really not that different to what the great masters of photography were doing back in the days.
It’s time to make the April edition of the Stocksy top 5 of the month, where I choose the best photos (in my opinion) that were accepted on Stocksy United last month:
PhotoCosma 