One of the things I’m hoping to do the next time I’m in Toronto is visit Mount Hope Cemetery. It’s a very small and out of the way Catholic cemetery that is filled with beautiful old memorial sculpture. I haven’t been there in years and I’m curious to see how much has changed. I’d also like to do a follow up to the series of shots I took there years ago.
The angel in this image was photographed in Mount Hope. I wonder what she look like now….?
In preparation of taking a break from Flickr for two weeks I had to select a series of images to pull from Flickr to post on my photoblog. (The break was at the suggestion of a friend, and it is a long overdue thing I’ve wanted to do. ) It was interesting having to choose eight or nine images at the same time, because I usually tend to do this spontaneously as I create an entry.
This image was created in Adobe Photoshop from three separate photos. It looks dramatically darker on the monitor I’m currently viewing it on, which gives it a completely different atmosphere than I’d intended – more menacing than mysterious and ethereal.
Are you searching for your soul?
Then come out of your prison.
Leave the stream and join the river
that flows into the ocean.
Absorbed in this world
you’ve made it your burden.
Rise above this world
There is another vision…
~ Rumi
I decided to go with the buddha for today’s photo blog post, in honour of the meditation retreat I did this past weekend. I have a long way to go before I’m any good at it. I think my mind is just too chaotic.
I recently gave a print of this image to a friend, so I thought I’d post it here. It’s good to dig up older creations to remind myself of work I’m happy with.
This image was created specifically as a donation for the Textile Museum of Canada’s annual silent auction fundraiser. The face is a stone sculpture I photographed in one of the Egyptian Museums in Berlin. The overall forms and textures were created by combining photos of waterlilies, graffiti, and a computer-generated design.
Entitled “Faith”, this was my very first digital composite when I began learning how to use Adobe Photoshop. The image is created from five separate photographs, including the markings around the female subject’s eye. I realized after I had completed it that each detail of the piece (excluding the portrait) had a religious association – the rose window from La Sagrada Familia, a lion from a tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica, and details from Catholic tombstones. Hence the title, “Faith.”
Before Catherine Jamieson started Utata, she led a much smaller private group that I was a part of called Woman. As you can guess, it was comprised of only female photographers and it provided a private place for “talented women who take their art seriously.” It didn’t last very long but while it did we worked on a few themed projects, much as Catherine still does now with the larger group of Utata. My favorite of these was “What to do with old love letters…” which inspired a series of shots I’m still very pleased with that involved the challenge of photographing fire.
This might be the creepiest image I have ever created. It was inspired in part by the work of Dave McKean.
The person in silhouette is my friend Zoe. The textured glass was one of the boardroom windows where I was working at the time, and I would pass them every day thinking of ways to use them in a photograph. I shot a small series in black & white of Zoe in different poses, and added the colour overlay in photoshop. It’s good to have friends who are willing to do silly things in the spirit of creativity, even at work.
Remember what I said about taking your camera everywhere?
Utata’s latest weekend project to get the creative juices flowing is “Utata goes to the movies.” I chose the Matrix as my inspiration.
My first thought was to recreate the poster of the original movie. I had to give that idea up due to space limitations in my apartment, and a lack of the right props. Instead I decided to go with this poster as my point of reference.
The image is a combination of the following two shots:
I used the radial blur filter on the shot of the dryers, lay it above the self portrait and then partially erased it using layer masking. The binary numbers were created in photoshop, and were blended with the rest of the image by changing the layer state to colour burn.