Seeing Anew: Transforming the Ordinary
Some of my favourite photographs began without fanfare. No perfectly lit sunset. No rare weather phenomenon. Just me, out walking, noticing something I hadn’t noticed before — a wall, a field, a view half-blocked by a tangle of thorns.
Farm Drain Landscape in Bold Colours is a good example. At its core, it’s nothing more than a farm drain set into a wall of concrete-filled sacks. Functional. Unremarkable. Not built to be admired. But once I brought it into my editing space, something else started to emerge. The rhythm of repeated shapes. The contrast between rough concrete and encroaching vegetation. And, with careful colour work, an image far removed from its plain, industrial beginnings.
Farm Drain Landscape in Bold Colours Before & After
That’s a recurring thread in my work, taking an everyday, even visually dull, subject and re-imagining it with digital tools. It’s not about deception, but about potential. What else might be here, hidden under the obvious?
Walking Without a Plan
When I head out with my camera, I don’t have a checklist. Yes, there are certain things you can’t help but notice, a mist rolling over the fields, the soft drama of a sunrise. But much of the time, I’m open to whatever appears. In another post, I talk about how walking shapes my creative process.
It’s a bit like how some painters take an ordinary street corner or kitchen table and, under their hand, it becomes something alive. I’d like to think my process works in a similar way, except my “brushwork” happens on a computer screen, long after the moment of capture.
From Field to ‘Endless Summer’
Take Endless Summer. On the day I took it, it was simply a field, grass, wildflowers, the distant line of houses. Pretty enough, but not a photograph that would stop anyone in their tracks.
In post-processing, though, I began shifting tones. The greens warmed to gold. The sky softened. The scene took on the kind of late-August haze you remember from a childhood you might not even have had. By the time it was finished, it felt less like a field in front of me and more like a memory from the past of a slow, hot hazy day summer, when the warmth evelopes you.
The Alchemy of Editing
My workflow always starts in Lightroom and often ends in Photoshop. I have pre-sets, but they rarely work as a one-click solution; they’re more like rough sketches. A lot of what happens is trial and error, sometimes over multiple sessions. Some images fail completely. Others begin to take shape slowly, until I realise I’m onto something.
Beyond the Thornes was one of those. I'd noticed the scene a year before but summer came and leaves removed the view. The following year I got my chance and grab afew shots on my mobile phone to take advantage of it hugh depth of field. Nothing inspiring about the original but I loved the brambled view. With colour work, contrast shifts, and a few risky edits, the scene became more like stained glass, bold outlines, luminous patches of colour. In some way the final edit has a kind of Fauvist feel to it using colour to expressing emotion and evoking a sense of vibrancy and energy, rather than a means of realistically depicting the subject.
Calm on the Surface, Uncertainty Beneath
I’m often trying to create images that feel calm, resolved, and pleasant to look at. But the truth is, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the making. I might spend hours pushing an image around before it begins to make sense, and even then, I’m not sure where it’s going until it’s nearly done.
The Farmhouse on the Hill is a good example. A rural scene, gentle slopes, a cluster of trees. In real life, perfectly nice, but with colour separation and stylisation, it took on a graphic, almost poster-like clarity. By the time it was finished, it looked both real and unreal — the kind of view you could believe in, even if you knew it never quite existed that way.
No Big Statement, Just an Invitation
I’m not trying to make grand claims with my photography. I’m not out to shock or deliver a message. If anything, I want to give viewers a quiet visual space to linger in, a reason to look twice.
Maybe they’ll see the hidden geometry in a drain. Maybe they’ll remember a field from their own past, even if it never looked quite like that. Maybe they’ll just enjoy the colours. All of those are fine with me. I’ve written before about how the internet changed the way artists share and discover work.
Still Figuring It Out
If I’m honest, I’m still trying to understand why I make art. Maybe it’s because, for a brief time, I get to see the world differently. Or maybe it’s because the process of making; the walking, the noticing, the wrestling with edits, is its own reward.
What I do know is this: beauty often hides in plain sight. You just have to be willing to find it, even when it looks like nothing much at all.
Works Mentioned:
- Farm Drain Landscape in Bold Colours
- Endless Summer
- Beyond the Thornes
- The Farmhouse on the Hill