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When I go around the rural areas around my village, I usually shoot upwards perhaps because I like to see how in the canopy, the branches of the trees play at not touching each other thanks to what biologists like to call "arboreal timidity"... In these days of dry season, the blue of the sky adds to this kind of photos and makes them an excellent base to experiment with transforming them by letting my imagination fly...

I

II

III

I like to spend hours and hours selecting some of my photos and transforming them, I find this something really relaxing and maybe close to what would be my feeling of being able to make oil paintings if my talent was enough for that... But, this is good... My PC is my canvas, my palette and my tubes of paints!.... :))

IV

V

At the end of this publication you can see the base photos for these digitally altered works. They are rather normal photos taken on a sunny morning... But one thing I did have in my mind at all time, was that these photos should be rich in diverse elements and combine tree branches with blue skies... This gave me enough raw material to make these images from those photos.

VI

VII

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CREATIVE PROCESS

This is the creative process for the work "I "... I have summarised it based on the steps I consider most relevant... You'll notice that my tools are quite basic (Photoshop, PhotoScape and Paint by default). This results in my creative process being very "handmade" and this is something that makes me feel very good and have a lot of time to relax doing this...

Lately I've been doing more and more things to achieve my digital transformation work with my photos. I usually do two or three basic transformations involving perspectives, off-centre cropping and use of liquefy and distort brushes. I then save each of these variations in layers and then proceed with something I call "shuffling the deck" by overlaying layers and varying transparency levels...

I jump between various editing tools with the typical joy of someone who has lost his mind and feels like a kid painting the walls of his house or the door of the fridge with the watercolours he should use at school... Even though I use basic and quite old tools, with every creative session I find new things to add to my creative works... Simple things like sparkle effects and reflective patterns become an added joy as I do this...

I can usually spend between 60 and 90 minutes transforming each photo. Although I confess that on this latest creative job, I was forced to complete the 7 transformed works in two sessions of about 5 hours each. This happens because I keep adding more and more layers to my final works I guess... But I'm very happy with all that time doing this!...

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MONOCHROME VERSIONS FOR ARTWORK "I"

Yes, today my "bonus images" are two versions of the creative work "I" in monochrome!... Let's see this!...

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SEE THE BASE SHOTS...

I	II	III

IV	V	VI	VII

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_{ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.}

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Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!

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Montalbán, Carabobo, Venezuela.