
Taken with my Contax camera, using Kodak 400CN Print film, with sepia tone added in Photoshop. This is one of my favorite portraits.

From my photo archive…
I was looking through my older photos for something to use in a digital image I’m currently working on and was reminded of this statue. I photographed her in a museum in Florence, Italy, when I was there in 1999. She was so beautiful I could’ve stared at her for hours. I’m very grateful the museum guards standing nearby didn’t mind me taking photos, or my cousin sitting down to sketch her.

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?
I just happen to be wearing these on my feet today.

The above shot was flickr blogged yesterday, which is pretty neat. It’s not a photo I would have chosen to represent my work to a wider audience, because it’s underexposed, the scan was really dirty, and I have a bazillion other shots that are so much better. (That’ll teach me to be lazy about cleaning up my scans when posting to flickr…)


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.