Source Medium: digital photograph (RAW) processed through Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS4.

Call this the first post for Communicating Arts — The Journal as it is exactly that, and I hope many more will follow.

Journal function: to advertise, market, and track the firm’s professional capabilities, development, experience, and philosophy.

Professional service providers in mid-life arrive armed with what they know and busy with what they’re learning.  The Communicating Arts capabilities associated with editorial services have been nothing short of outstanding; those involving straightforward photography: solid.  As the enterprise forges ahead, however, it has the opportunity to improve the blend of the two core business talents–editorial and photography services–with target print and web publishing products intended for advertising, marketing, public relations, and sales.  Whether it will build creative services demand for itself may be a question mark today: as many artists do, I spend a great deal of time engaged in artistic and intellectual pursuits that afford fit and freedom within the contemporary academic and fine arts environments.

In brief: I am not the Main Street photographer.

I am more accurately “writer as entertainer” and photographer as “artist, director, and producer”–perhaps “traveler” should fit in there as well even though I’ve been logging more Windows time over the past year or two than days out in the community or cruising the highways and walking back roads and fields, which I would love to do, intend to do–that and perhaps rediscovering the look of farm life and rural living.

In fact, if you, my reader, know anyone who owns a farm and would care to host an entertaining guest, well just let me know: I enjoy driving, and if there’s photography to be done and music to be made at the destination, all the better!

Above: the photograph cum painterly artifact represents a first departure from photography’s “fidelity to the real”, the essence of the art’s 20th Century “Golden Age” and what has been until now the predominant expectation about what a photograph should look like. 

These days, a recording made with light may be processed to look more real than real or unlike anything resembling the object of initial interest.  Cultural and social contexts will continue to bind the manner in which an image may be treated, but the technology itself no longer constrains a picture to coming out “looking like a photograph”.  The desktop tools, here Adobe’s Design Suite, pull initial recorded content toward treatment as base material for design and illustration.

My response to all that: whatever my other interests, the day has come to become more involved in the Adobe line of design and media-creating products, and so I have entered that learning process.  Programs at my fingertips (among others): Dreamweaver (web design); Flash; Illustrator; InDesign (print publication layout); Photoshop CS4.

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