Happy Sunday! This week, John from Journeys with Johnbo is the host for this week’s Lens-Artists challenge. Instead of a physical road, the theme he has chosen led me down a metaphoric one and I’m talking about the style of photography.

Here’s something about me: I am as tone-deaf about art as someone might be about music. I can’t draw even if my life depends on it nor can I figure out what one of those famous paintings is about even if I stand there studying it all day.

Photography, in a way, is probably the closest to me making art without involving any sort of drawing or painting. When I go somewhere, my instinct would be to shoot landscape photography, second to that would be macro or close-up followed by abstract. Surprisingly, I’ve never been into portrait photography (other than wildlife), I think I just haven’t had the practice of photographing people. One of my favorite ways to photograph landscapes is through a panorama.

I see panoramas as a way to get a sense of a complete picture, sort of like a memory – the more complete it is, the more vivid it will be. The same with a panorama. I want the camera to be the extension of what I see because in many ways, the camera captures more than the human eye can ever see.

After getting a new laptop last summer, I began to edit some of the older photos I took in recent years, photos I didn’t get to edit on my old laptop because it was so slow. I was unaware I took so many photos that could be merged into panoramas in Lightroom like my opening photo and this one, which were probably 10+ photos merged to form one large photo.

On my old laptop, it would’ve taken hours to merge these photos and not being the most patient person in the world, I would’ve terminated the process at some spot in time.

As I mentioned, photography is the closest thing to me creating art without the act of drawing and painting. Lightroom and Photoshop is such a wonderful tool to help me turn my photos into such thing. I didn’t know what to do with the above photo from the get-go – the original image looked grey and dreary. So I turned it black and white and created something that’s different.

No matter whether you are into landscape photography, macro or close-up, or portrait, I think photography is about perception – what you see and the story you want to tell is what makes your style of photography unique.