Tom Donald
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tomclearwood.bsky.social
Tom Donald
@tomclearwood.bsky.social
190 followers 210 following 59 posts
I'm here for the Indy: hope & community
photographer, fifty years behind the shutter developing prsonl styl
safe behind the fluffy barrier of obscurity
diversity - equity - inclusion: but Scottish, so more so.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/clearwood/
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tomclearwood.bsky.social
the so-called real world's harsh but its shapes harmonies and tones can be worked into the still safe silent space of a picture. I prefer to see the outside world as Unmade Art than what I fear it might really be.
Another new one for #ArtAdventCalendar day12
an abstract townscape in bright colours, the buildings are irregular and human-scale, there are trees and railings and chimneys and windows, many of which appear lighted. The overall impression is of kinda cosy domesticity, largely through colour choices, oranges and reds towards the centre of the picture, with more blues and shadows towards the trailing edges. Another photo of Lisbon was the basis for this one but I don't remember what I mixed it with although it was only yesterday. Something Belgian I expect.
December 12, 2025 at 7:39 AM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
A new picture for day11 of #ArtAdventCalendar

Ghent garage + lovely Lisbon hillside buildings:
2 photos mixed with a "difference" blend mode
+
theshold layers for whites and blacks
+
compressed colour areas by histogram adjustment
+
fabulously tasteful colour edit
=
another pretty picture
hello
a checkerboard of orange roofing and white and blue walls abstracted and idealised to an indistinct geometry. It's a human scale environment with a seaside or holiday vibe. The colours of wade pottery glazing on my grandmother's turtles. No AI got I.
December 11, 2025 at 7:59 AM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
Lisbon! There's a lot been going on there for a thousand years and it looks it, a proper old town built on hills and FRIGHTFULLY Portuguese. Here's an old house with some lovely southern European vibes... It's my picture for #ArtAdventCalendar day10
An irregular old building sits on a cobbled street on the side of a hill. There are trees and plants in pots, and some building work is going on because there's a skip! Photographically this is very unrealistic, I've messed about with the colours and the textures, as usual.
December 10, 2025 at 4:55 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
cogs elevate a museum here's some
from glum
berlin
compositionally it's a cloud machine for
#ArtAdventCalendar day9
big cog wheels the colours of tomato soup seen through a jumbled iigsaw sky. The colours bring a little summer into the otherwise oily browns of the so-called real world. crossing the channels xxx
December 9, 2025 at 8:51 AM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
I don't really do people photographically
1) stealing their souls
2) shapeshift
3) rude to point
but when I'm actually married I'll give it a go so here's
Mary under the watertower
for this UXORIOUS
#ArtAdventCalendar day8
a triple exposure remix
Portrait of a sideways woman. Somewhat abstract, she shimmers and is fringed with colour. There's a feeling of movement or vitality. Is she looking at her phone? Or taking another photo of the dog? Who knows. She is THE PRESENCE in the picture
December 8, 2025 at 5:25 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
More travel photography. I took pictures from Berlin and made this. Flowers and machines! two of my favourite subjects. Anyhow this is my kind of robot with notes in the ALT xxx
for #ArtAdventCalendar day7
it's abstract, see, made of flowers and machinery with red bits and flowing wires. Photographically it's all about composition, balanced containment within the frame. The content of the image has flavours of adventure and resolutely facing into the wind with courage. see also the creative optimism of nuts and bolts
December 7, 2025 at 7:27 AM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
Oooooohh dogs in Scotland land of windy mud wee mammals and dogpeople walking about for a chat and a biscuit
Healthy you know?
this is chloe, a handsome black labrador in the pretty collar that denotes domestication. She is sitting in some nice fluffy grass on a country hillside. As pretty as a picture, she is in this case a pretty picture. Woof! The main photographic element here is compostion. I love my wee fold out screen that means I can put my camera at ground level without having to go there with it.
December 6, 2025 at 7:56 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
ok ok ok the leaves aren't blue.
reality's inadequacies.
texture texture, it's photography of a better woody world
#AbstractLenspressionism
#ArtAdventCalendar day6
a tree lifts barky branches like elegant fingers into blue leaves it's knightswood park baby, and I've shuffled the channels and revolved the colours and so on to make dick the druid's imaginary plantscape: cornflower colours at woodland scale
December 6, 2025 at 5:47 AM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
It's kind of you to comment and I'm so glad you're onto the vibe of this picture. If I can extract a pretty thing from the dirty old world and fix it into a frame I'll do it. Click, click.
ah the running dogs ears aflapping after a stick, fun loving pets in the park. Green channel, often the sharpest with my ?Sony? sensor. That's Ellie with the stick she's the fastest lab in the pack and loves to play with Chloe, seen here charging up on the inside
December 6, 2025 at 5:20 AM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
Choosing a picture for day5 of #ArtAdventCalendar has been strangely difficult... I actually put a picture up earlier, then deleted it because I wanted something a bit more... FLAMBOYANT!

Then I found what I needed in November, it's a burned out car: Out of the strong came forth sweetness right?
Colour sweeps over the picture, tiger stripes in blues and gold. We may see that the colours obscure the underlying shape; a burned out car but the abstraction is the meaning of the picture
December 5, 2025 at 8:52 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
last week in california I saw the pacific ocean do this
#colour #photography
sunshine on the blue sea breaks luminous greens that crash to boiling foamy whites
December 5, 2025 at 3:07 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
bleep!
dark room enlarger me 1976
December 5, 2025 at 2:59 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
So @plantteaching.bsky.social travels the world... sometimes I tag along.
This time Belgium. Ghent! I loved it.

plenty of raw material.. I like to make the world look GOOD in my photography because it is, if you look carefully.

This picture's all about SUNSHINE
for #ArtAdventCalendar day4
A pedestrian crossing, buildings in Mediterranean city style, this could be any sunlit old city. There are broad bands of bright balcony above and in front, and shady places. Peeping in at the edge A TREE. The style is high contrast! black and white and soft pastel colours. the vibe is stillness in the sun. If you start off with a nice composition then you can boil it down to its elements. I so love a threshold layer for this with a darken blend mode and another one for brightness, then histogram adjustment for the band of colours in between. The aim of these adjustments? To make a pretty picture actually. I think this is closer to the direct visual effect of the original scene, than an unedited photograph would be.
December 4, 2025 at 7:21 AM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
This year I went to Berlin; didn't like it.

But there were some nice engines in the technischen museum; here are two of them in my picture called "An Artist's Tribute to Professor Branestawm". #RoleModel

This is my #ArtAdventCalendar day 3 pic. I was trying for "cheerful" with this edit.
the shapes of machinery, the colour of parrots, abstract, visually evasive, fills but is contained in the frame. It's a bit indescribable actually. I used my usual technique for this, spitting images into RGB and HSL channels and remixing, then colour editing for a bit of harmony. With dull metals in shades of brown I find that the saturation channel can often be usefully remixed as the hue channel of a new image. Or sometimes hue makes an interesting lightness. And these components can be mixed in layers using various blend modes... After working on this for twenty years I've almost got a grasp of how to do it.
December 3, 2025 at 6:41 AM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
Old Lisbon in Portugal was the highlight of my photographic year, what a city! I love to come home knowing I have a thousand exposures of interesting scenes to work on.. here's two of them on day two of #ArtAdventCalendar #photography
ancient buildings and ironwork in an abstract colourful style. We are looking through a gateway towards pretty houses at zany angles man! The image has more in common with early 20th century modernist art than photography as generally perpetrated in the 21st century. It is harmonious in intent and looks groovy when I printed it.
December 2, 2025 at 12:50 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
we're just back from california... here's a quick edit of a misty scene. I'm afraid this kind of hobbit-land prettification editing is just the kind of thing that AI does so convincingly, but in this case it was me honest! I've put some notes in the ALT text about how I did it #photography #ca #usa
I was up a hill looking over an undulating landscape of wooded valleys and hills, a suburban scene with the Orinda Intermediate School in a series of sheds in the middle ground. There are many single story ranch style houses in this scene, but most of them are hidden by the pretty trees in their gardens. This very american suburb was built in the nineteen sixties and onwards and most of the trees are a lot younger there we are! Three adjustment layers, firstly a brightness/contrast layer which adjusted the contrast up and the brightness way down to make the minimal structures in the brightest part of the image available, then a general increase of contrast, then another gradient fill on an strongly plus blue plus a bit of green white balance layer before, taken with my lovely Panasonic Lumix camera. I'd generally underexpose this kind of scene to get some content in the brightest areas, expecting to adjust the finished picture in my edit
December 2, 2025 at 12:33 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
It's time for #ArtAdventCalendar to start up again!
Here's my first picture, imagine opening a little door...
This on is one of my mixes, two photos from the Science Museum in Leiden. I mix using layers with a "difference" blend mode. So both pictures contribute equally, then I edit for colour.
Two photos mixed together. This one is a microscope and a room in one of Leiden's beautiful museums. The picture is all about colour, and shapes that don't necessarily make much visual sense... But to me, it's a window into a better and more harmonious world, where colour is king, and reality is something we can't quite grasp.
December 1, 2025 at 2:54 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
Oooh back to editing again thanks to my mrs dragging me out of the house to go to Lisbon. A view under the amazing and great 25th April Bridge, a scene up by the castle in b&w, another with a lovely orange skip then yippee it's disco peacock
buildings seen though the underside of a mighty bridge. It's edited to emphasise the sunlit geometricity of the concrete legs and all surfaces are wiped clean of anything smaller than a tortoise. Clearly another edit done to make the human world look prettier than it is by essentially sterilising it. It IS pretty though ancient buildings in classic black and white photography style. These irregular buildings make interesting irregular shapes in shades of textured grey. It looks like conservation zone because it is. a highly pictorial arrangement of street photographed and thoroughly edited by me with exquisite good taste a peacock in full display fills the frame he's a feathery firework living in the ancient castle above Lisbon. These buggers scream.
March 8, 2025 at 9:20 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
Here's our christmas card, home made as usual... We made it to give to our dog walking friends in the park but now our wee dog is on heat so we can't go anywhere near the park without risking an unfortunate event.

Merry Christmas Everyone!
an undeniably cute black labrador puppy looks calmly at the viewer. Around her the words "wishing you a very chloe christmas, happy and healthy with plenty of biscuits"
December 22, 2024 at 12:29 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
Here's an ancient Roman. I once made a big print of this, seven feet by five, and displayed it in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens.
a carved stone face, it's a roman man, the photo has been edited to increase his personal charm. And it's worked.
December 12, 2024 at 7:06 PM
tomclearwood.bsky.social
landing on a new social network is arriving at a party to find a few people scattered around talking indistinctly... I'll just go and stand around in the kitchen and not say much...
But here's one of my numerous pictures of skips
flaking yellow paint on the distinctive shapes of a skip or dumpster
September 26, 2023 at 11:02 AM