My wife posts old pictures on Facebook every Thursday. She calls it ‘Throwback Thursday’. My job is to provide the raw materials, which often requires scanning old prints and negatives. A recent ‘Throwback Thursday’ covered Italy – or at least Rome, Florence and Venice. So I set about scanning some old negatives, one of which was of the Michelangelo Pieta in St. Peters, Rome. This was a really bad picture taken many years ago when my technical skills were even less developed than they are now. It’s extremely dark, blurred because of the very slow shutter speed, and very grainy. I couldn’t include it in her ‘Throwback Thursday’, but it did give me something to play around with. By deliberately increasing the blur and bumping up the ‘graininess’ could I make this into something almost impressionistic. I also added some light streaks. So does this reflect a new direction in my work. Something more ‘out of the box’ going beyond my usual cliche’d images? Is this a more artistic Howard? Nah! Still just a lousy picture. Proves once again that “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” or in this case you can’t produce Monet from a digitally enhanced awful photograph. Although as I look at this again it’s starting to grow on me …..

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