See extra large view here

This picture is really important to me.

Gordon Lake, Tasmania in drought. The lake was created/enlarged by the Gordon Dam and now, in the time of drought, the devastation caused by that dam is plain to see.

When I arrived at the lake and was confronted with the landscape before me, I had mixed feelings of it being possessed of a strange dark beauty, whilst at the same time it seemed to speak to me of some kind of impending doom and devastation………..an indicator if you will of man’s folly and what may be if we don’t get a grip on the environment. The dead trees seemed to speak loudly of death,due to their black colouration.

The day was drizzly with poor light and I knew that I couldn’t capture the image in camera, well enough to portray what I was feeling.

In view of this, the image here, and another that I shall post later, was arrived at by “playing around” all day until such time as I arrived at an image that spoke to me of how I felt when I first saw the lake. I am not a PS guru and the processing was a matter of “suck it and see” with many visits to the recycle bin and starts anew.

It has made me think deeply about my art and I have come to realise only now, after all these years, that my primary focus has always been to portray how I feel and not what I see…………are they one and the same?………….I don’t know? I do know though, that the limitation of film and sensor, rarely portray (in the raw image) just how I feel when I am taking a picture.

This realisation came to me when after listening to my many sighs and tuts, my son asked, “why are you spending so much time on that? It looked ok when you downloaded it from the camera.” “That may be”, said I, but the original just doesn’t stir me as the lake did when I first saw it. I’m trying to re-create that feeling."

The image here is how I felt when I first saw that lake I suppose, not how I, or the camera saw it, and if I can, through my photography and processing, arrive at those feelings each time I view my images, then I will be a happy man.

Hope it stirs something in you.

Canon 40D 18-55 IS photomatix tone-mapped and other processing