Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Boy in Red

Defocus: The act or result of causing a lens to deviate from accurate focus.

The VFXY Photos theme for this week is “Defocus”, a subject I have explored many times and therefore both natural and challenging. Natural because I have so many images at hand to select from and challenging since I can only offer one.

I settled on this modernist and spartan composition of a boy in a red shirt walking past; seen in Santa Fe Plaza back in 2008. A craft fair was being set up in the square and the sunlit white tents of the booths simplify the background of the boy walking in the shade of the governor’s palace.

Our day trips to Santa Fe have always been photographically fruitful, with a higher proportion of peopled street scenes than is usually found in my shy person’s portfolio. Tourist locations are good opportunities for the easily embarrassed Gary Winogrand wanna-be; no one is much surprised or concerned with the camera pointed in their general direction. Stratford-On-Avon and Santa Fe have more in common than the weather and accent would lead you to believe. We return to New Mexico again this summer, staying near Taos but certain to spend at least a couple of days in Santa Fe.

You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.

Red Mouth

The bloody red maw of an ogre approaches through the unconscious; a monster in the dark of a dream. In reality, the puddle reflected neon of a YMCA sign in the gloaming at the end of a kid’s birthday party water balloon battle.

An old image rediscovered with Adobe Lightroom; an accident of impatience and marketing trickery. Desperate to work with images on my new iMac, and with my Photoshop for Mac package crawling across Georgia towards Texas in a FedEx truck, I resorted to downloading the “free for now” beta of Lightroom 3. For the first time I see my 10,000 digital images in one sweep. I found this unfinished and long forgotten work from 2004; I am hooked, Adobe will suck still more money from my wallet.

My “cross-grade” copy of Photoshop CS4 finally arrived on Tuesday evening; too late to stop the tendrils of Lightroom from winding into my brain but my Mac transition is now complete and I am lost to Microsoft.

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From the same discovery: