Message board, Franklin Street.

In a departure from my usual, I am using an untouched, unedited shot.  I saw this message board with months worth of handbills, announcements, advertisements, and concert posters.  As layers were added and ripped away, it acquired an unplanned texture that is more interesting than the stuff I create with Decim8.  The closer I look, the better it looks.

See, there she is again, peeking in through a shattered window at my office. Kind of creepy.

One morning I arrived at the office and there was a broken plate glass window in the hall.  I was blown away when I saw how beautifully graphic it was, so managed to snap a few pictures just before they came to fix it.  Maybe the workers thought I was an insurance adjuster, but they waited until I was finished.

Used the model’s face as the background, and Superimpose-d the broken glass on top, with the vegetation peeking through. No other adjustments or editing.

There are themes that I explore again and again.  In my photography, my journal, my conversations, the books I read. For a long time it was stone angels, I must have read Look Homeward Angel 4 times.  So what is it now, my obsession? ObsessionS, plural?  iPhoneography, for sure.  Themes in my pictures: fashion images set against some improbable and challenging background.  This particular model is currently the face of Marc Jacobs.  Every month there is a Marc Jacobs ad in all the fashion rags that has always set a model in some setting, and styled her, to be deliberately ugly.  Counterintuitive, but it makes you look twice, stare even, trying to read the secret meaning in the image.

The model he uses now is this Chinese model, who is being photographed in settings such as urban jungles (as opposed to flower meadows), grungy graffitied walls and such.  Still not pretty, which is exactly why I like them.  So I have become obsessed with this model, who becomes more beautiful the more you grunge it up.  She apears again and again in the images I’m doing.  Since I don’t like pixel-perfect images, I like to take her face and apply it to my own imagined settings, such as the swirling-galaxy background above, which is actually a picture of a store window in Chapel Hill, NC.

Thanks to Marc Jacobs for an innovative approach to their advertising, and how we are forced to see fashion in a different way.

Hungry?

Or just without taste?  I was looking and looking for a certain picture on my iPhone, of a broken window, whose shatter patterns I particularly liked.  I couldn’t it find it (yet) but I found this pomegranate pic, which looks vaguely obscene, or at least not like vegetable matter, so I put it on a Decim8-ed background and added the eggs to give it the edible factor.

As I’ve written before, there are some days when the creative juice just doesn’t flow, it congeals.  And this is Sunday, folks, which means work tomorrow.   All of which adds up to me trying to force my mind back into its engineer box so I won’t suffer unnecessarily tomorrow.

So this is going to be my effort for tonight.  Note to self:  back up the blog.  Hackers have brought my site to its knees twice before, for no apparent reason.  Practice safe hex, protect your IP, take a backup, floss, dance, laugh.

Good night all, let’s gird our loins for the coming week.

Eggs.

Everyone should take a picture of eggs, the possibilities are endless.  Here, I held the eggs and framed them by holding my hand over a black bowl.  I added the B&W effect using Iris PhotoSuite and played up the contrast (all from the iPhone).

Tonight in my photography club we were creating still lifes.  While waiting for everyone to show up, I picked up an egg – a thing of beauty.  So perfect! So symmetric!  So symbolic!

While others were setting up tripods etc, I edited this and posted it, thus giving people one more reason to respect the iPhoneographers among us.

Somesville, Maine

On a gloomy day during a week-long excursion to Bar Harbor in Maine, I took the morning off from climbing and kayaking adventures for a leisurely drive around the island.  All of a sudden I came to a screeching halt when I passed a cozy building with a sign saying “Port In A Storm Books”.  A bookstore!  That’s almost better than a granite cliff!

I spent a blissful two hours inside and emerged with a stack of reading for later and noticed this mystically beautiful sight behind the parking lot.  No special processing here, even the vignetting was natural from the light glowing in the background.

Just looking at this picture takes me back to a moment of peace I will always treasure.

Crazed comet.

I hate it when these things crash to earth right outside your house.  Fortunately, that didn’t really happen, it’s just my imagination at work creating disturbing images.  This one was fun to do and I won’t say how I did it because it would spoil the effect.

The interesting thing for me about creating this was that when I let my imagination just go where it wants, sometimes I’m really surprised myself. It wasn’t my dark intention to create an image of destruction, but once I got going on it, it needed to be done. It’s the sci fi addict in me I guess, so I just went with it.