Gallery: Photoshop art by Christophe Kiciak

Christophe Kiciak is entirely self-taught in Photoshop and photography. He has created some fantastic images and the standard of his work is by no means amateur. We asked him about how he developed this skill.

Do you use Photoshop in your full-time work or just in your spare time as a hobby?

Photos and Photoshop are just a hobby, although a growing one. My full-time job is in the IT security field; I manage a penetration testing team, and we try to be as creative as possible in order to check whether the security of our customers is good or not. I try to use this creativity in my pictures too.

When did you first start using Photoshop?

I began photography in June 2009. Before that, I had zero knowledge about taking photos, let alone how to tweak them or create composites. I rapidly felt the need to try to be creative, at first using simple software (such as Lightroom), but I felt quite limited. My first picture really involving Photoshop was created in July 2010. It was quite an experience; despite the picture not being too complex, I probably spent over 30 hours creating it, learning Photoshop on-the-fly. At the time I was really pleased with the result, and from then I got quite hooked.

Are you self-taught in Photoshop, or did you have training?

I learned everything I know about Photoshop on the internet – blogs and tutorial sites mainly. The amount of information available is gigantic. I spent hours and hours trying various things and found my own ways of using the tools.

The most important thing is to know what you want to achieve. Once that is clear in your mind, it is just a matter of finding a way to create your idea. I like the ‘research’ that is involved in that. I believe that you can use this same creativity in other situations in order to solve problems or arrive at technical solutions.

What is your main source of inspiration for your images?

I often enter amateur challenges. I find these to be very convenient, in the sense that they provide a specific topic and a deadline. Those constraints motivate me. I also spend lot of time looking at the photos and creations of other people on the internet and also in books. They are a great source of inspiration in terms of the process behind creating the image, and also sometimes give me ideas for new images. The rest comes from extensive thinking about a specific subject. Thinking about my next project usually takes much more time than actually creating it.

View Christophe’s portfolio on Flickr or 1x.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2012 at 9:40 am and is filed under Showcase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.