Location: Canada
Professor Emeritus in Engineering, Dr. Bédard retired at the age of 56 to pursue full-time his career as a fine art landscape photographer. Self-taught, he participated to advanced workshops. He's highly active teaching and exhibiting, selling successfully in art galleries. His photos decorate several houses, magazines, and books on 4 continents. https://yvanbedardphotoart.com
In this portfolio, I present photographs made with my own digital technique inspired by the original solarization technique developed a century ago and made popular by Man Ray. It reverses positive to negative spaces in the photographs. Although pseudo-solarization filters exist in commercial post-processing software, I developed my own technique from scratch to better control the results.
While solarization is a marginal technique traditionally used in B&W with portraits and nudes, I use my adaptation for landscapes both in color and B&W. A very rare combination.
“L'Anse du ruisseau - Brook Cove”
This solarized photograph shows the cove of Natashquan, Quebec, Canada. Solarization reversed the darkest positive parts of the photo into their negative (mostly dark green reversed in light purple, and shadow areas into light areas) while the lightest parts remained positive images. The result is a pleasant, well-balanced fairy-like composition.
“Where Salting and Drying Fish Created a Village.”
In this solarized photograph, the sky and the ground look like they are in fire while the fishermen sheds look like floating on water and being protected by nice clouds and light. This contrast creates surprising and competing emotions, thanks to solarization taking place only in the darkest areas of the photograph.
“The Puffins Island Lighthouse.”
While the sunset normally creates a bright and dark, contrasty scene, solarization changes the balance of light and colors by reversing the greenish and darkish zones of this scene into blueish and whitish areas. On the other hand, lightest areas keep their initial colors. Once again, solarization creates a new scene between reality and an out-of-this-world vision, leading to different feelings.
By maximizing the effects of solarization in this slot canyon (Arizona) in B&W, the leading lines create a completely new scene. Here, we can imagine 2 persons facing each other just before kissing.
“The Kiss”
