Photo Friday: Photo Art

I never think of myself as an artist. I think that if someone were to call me one, I would laugh.

Not to hurt, but more out of surprise.

When someone asks me what I do for a living, I simply say that I'm a writer. I'm a technical writer, I'm a published author, and I'm a blogger.

So, in short, I'm a writer.

I'm not a professional photographer. It's a passion of mine, but photography is a hobby. I suppose that, many years ago, when I worked as a reporter in Wakefield, I was also a photographer for the newspaper. But I never called myself a photographer. I was a reporter.

Thanks to the digital age of photography, I've been able to do more with my photos, and faster.

The other week, I organized a photo walk through the downtown core of Ottawa. A handful of photo enthusiasts joined me and took some great pictures.

I didn't post all of my photos to the group Flickr album. Some of them, I thought, weren't particularly good. That's to be expected when you shoot scads of photos.

But over the weeks that have followed, I looked at some of the photos that I had panned after the shoot. I had downloaded the photos from my camera to my iPad after the walk, when we were all enjoying ourselves at the pub, and now I was looking to delete some of them. But before I did, I wanted to play with them to see if I could make them worth keeping.

I had shot four pictures of the Oscar Peterson statue, at the NAC. I kept one for the Flickr page, but I wasn't exactly happy with the others. Until I started playing with them in Snapseed, that is. I posted those pictures for this week's Wordless Wednesday.

Another shot that I thought wasn't very interesting was one I took of the National War Memorial, at the top of Elgin Street. The original photo looked washed out and colourless because of the bright sun and haze.

Using Snapseed, I added many dramatic filters and pushed the fine-tuning tools to their limits. And the image started looking less like a photograph and more like a painting.

Looking at this image on my iPad, I felt less like a photographer and more like an artist.

And I made myself laugh.

Happy Friday!