Portrait Pro software is pretty cool, especially when you do as many headshots and portraits as I do. It is a very simple way to give skin tones the spa treatment. I think it works better too, with women than men for some reason. Maybe because smoothing out men’s skin is not so fashionably desired as smoothing out a women’s skin. The program also adjust density, which I don’t necessarily want to see. But I am sure I can figure it out and make it work for me. I see a preset tab which tells me you can create your own look and save it for future re use. Man, photo software has come a long since I started using it 20 years ago. Have you ever used Topaz software? I did for a long while on my landscapes and urbanscapes. Not so much anymore. It did provide an unusual pop to a lot my Rome works. It seems I can never be happy with the look of a “straight” photograph, whatever that is and always to push my images into another realm. A place where it obvious doesn’t look like a photograph anymore, like my current iPhone works. And I have taken a bunch of shit for it too. People seem to want photographs to look like photographs, to look like your work. I mean after all you are making true photographs that truly represent what you saw, right? And what an incredible eye and camera you must have. Of course I am joking and think your work is top notch. But your work is more “real” and not some bastard photographic child like mine. Ever find yourself in discussions about what makes a photograph a photograph? When asked once at a show of my Roma work at SAM, a guy standing next to one of my very large prints asked me what he was looking at? That is didn’t look like a photograph. I said it started with a camera. But can you imagine standing next to a painting in a major museum and asking “Hey Van Gogh, what am I looking at?”. Just a little pet peeve of mine I guess. Seems I am always resisting having my work shoved into someone’s else’s definition of photography.
