painting with my camera - the beginning

Back when I first started getting into photography I was almost completely against photo editing. I used to think that editing your photos was basically lying, because photography, after all, was not painting and was supposed to convey reality as it was, and the photographer's skill and talent was about how they captured that moment and their intention behind it. With time, however, I begun to see photography as a medium for self-expression that can go way beyond capturing reality as it is. I started seeing it as a way of capturing reality as I, personally, saw it (or even how I wanted to see it) which wasn't always 100% true to the general perception.. but also as a way of not capturing reality at all, but simply using my camera as a paintbrush to create something I simply just imagined.. a piece I wanted to say something more with, something I couldn't possibly say if I just stuck to reality as we know it. And this is how my love for photo compositing was born. Mind you, this was a little before the time of AI being able to conjure up anything you prompt it with.

This is one of my first such "paintings" created from about a dozen pictures, a few textures, lots of layers and hours of photoshop play- with zero guilt about not sticking to reality, because that was not the aim for me anymore.

2015

I still continued to photograph things I found interesting, as they were, just to capture those moments, for me or to share them with others, I love photography for that, but I certainly loosened up on the post-production front and as I studied various techniques and learned the right tools, (and also having done some inner work as well) I gave myself much more freedom to experiment and play with photo-editing, answering to no one but myself.