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David Walker https://www.vista-foto.com/

PhotoArt in Lockdown!

I was scheduled to display at three different art exhibitions during the pandemic lockdown, a display,
jointly with Ann Slim at the Shenstone Library, a showcase at the Curborough Festival of Artists
(jointly with Ann Slim and Colin Brooks and of course the Yoxall Village Fete with the Yoxall Art
Group. Ann and Colin are both members of the Yoxall Art Group.

My plans were therefore thrown out of the window and I have reverted to producing new images and
experimenting with styles and methodologies. All my work is produced from my own photographs,
which may have proved difficult during lockdown, I have not taken a single image this year…but I do
have a collection of over 115,000 photos to fall back on.

This month I decided to concentrate on bird and animal images. Believe it or not these do offer a
special challenge to PhotoArtists, how far away from the original carefully taken and processed
photograph can I deviate? As a wildlife photographer I was used to dealing in razor sharp focus,
especially with the eyes, and finding a background that did not take away from the beauty of the
beast!

When I look at my photographs I do so in the “space” in which they were created. What did we see
when we looked at the scene before clicking the shutter? Does the image match that scene? So
often it does not, but as a PhotoArtist I have the power to recreate the image as I remember, so
often the colours of a photograph do not match my vision! That is something I can play with and
accentuate to show the majesty of the scene I remember. Some may call that cheating…but not me,
the artist inside of me wants to share the beauty of the scene I photographed, PhotoArt enables me
to do just that

Baby Elephant