Six Photographs of a Door

In pursuit of photographs for Alcy’s Portfolio Review we once again roamed some of my favorite areas of Houston in search of marks. Not that I have yet discovered exactly what a mark is; I may be getting closer. I spent the day doing my usual randomness photographs. We ended up in Katy at a Katy Photography Meetup session critiquing photographs. Made for a very, very long day—mostly because I stayed up past two o’clock processing photographs.

In Montrose there is a place called The Texas Junk Company. A year or so ago, Larry Belt and I was granted permission to photograph inside and I thought that since Alcy and I do a lot of shooting inside antique stores that we might find something of interested. Well The Texas Junk Company is closed until the 21^st—the owner is probably off on a world cruise or something of that nature. That didn’t stop us from photographing the outside. There was several stacks of old doors, one of which had a sign, “Free Doors-this stack only.” I should have taken a few because they seemed to have endless possibilities for randomness.

 

The following six photographs are from the surface of only one of the doors. As everyone knows, I have no concern for “true color,” actually believe the term itself is an oxymoron and that no such animal actually exists. That leaves me free to do what I please colorwise and believe me, had you been with me when I took the photographs you still would not have been able to identify the source of these images. The door was painted white; there was a subtle mixture of very light, pastel colors but nothing that remotely resembles these final images. I also did something in processing that I do not normally do—I used exactly the same steps in processing each of the images. Generally I process an image independent of any other image which means that the colors and tonal ranges could have varied considerably. That is generally my preference. However I wanted these six images to relate to each other as the areas of the door related so I made an exception. Actually the processing is a single step--histogram equalization. Outside of that they are another oxymoron--straight out of the camera. However, that in no way implies that they look like they did on the LCD. They don't. Just means there was no additional manipulation or cropping.

 

I realize that not everyone appreciates or enjoys this genre of photography. I do. It is something I have been doing for over fifty years so I suppose I will continue. No, I don’t suppose; I will.