Friday 5 December 2014

David Keochkerian

David Keochkerian isn’t a photographer by trade. His real profession lies in the realms of physical medicine and rehabilitation and only practises photography as a hobby. He says he has only been practising photography for the past three years, although he grew up with it around him and as a general interest because his father worked as a practising photographer, so he is no stranger to the dark room. However is only became a real passion for him in the past couple of years.
Keochkerian has this to say about his work ‘I like to capture the fleeting, the subtle, the beautiful, the rare, the spectacular, the staggering…to reveal how the daily and the ordinary can b filled with enthusiasm.’ (Keochkerian, D. 2014). 

Keochkerian’s website can be found by following this link…http://www.david-keochkerian.com/#filter=.home

Looking through Keochkerian’s portfolio it is easy to see that he uses many different techniques including HDR, panoramic, long exposure, black and white, and in doing so photographs different subjects. But what caught my attention and why I’m looking into this practitioner is his work with landscapes and using infrared techniques.
What interested me about this work was that it’s a fairly simple technique that results in quite dramatic surreal effects.
The landscapes look quite extraordinary because of their colour casts, they look completely out of this world because it depicts something so similar to us (the landscape) but presented so differently as well (because of the colour casting).

I came across Keochkerian’s work while looking at a blog by Christopher Jobson.

Jobson describes Keochkerian’s work as ‘Dr. Seuss-style surreal photography’ and ‘seasons seem reversed, with white trees appearing in spring, and bushes are transformed into something that looks like fragile blades of bubble gum’ (Jobson, C. 2013). I agree with how Jobson has described these images, they are quite strange to look at, but as I said that’s because they are so similar to what we know, but presented so differently. The colour casting works so well to create a surreal effect making the images appear like they are capturing scenes from a completely different world, something you would expect to see in sci-fi movies.

David Keochkerian

David Keochkerian

David Keochkerian

David Keochkerian

Looking through this work it gives me inspiration and fresh ideas of how to create surreal effects in my own work. Before I was thinking of just making black and white images, but looking through this and seeing the effects you can get from changing the colour casts to what people don’t expect to see (a slightly green tinted sky, yellow and white tress, etc) makes me reconsider my output. Maybe these inverted colour techniques are a way to go.

Follow these links to see more of Keochkerian's work.


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