Many weeks ago I marked today on the calendar because the moonrise and sunset were at exactly the same time. This is perfect when you live by the ocean, and it just so happened to be on Thanksgiving… I ate my meal and went to the beach. It was very cloudy, but the sunset was brilliant, and the moon peeked out for just a few minutes, long enough to set up my tripod and capture this… I’m thankful for that.
My newest work involved making patterns from photographs. My plan is to being photography into the realm of textiles. In order to visualize the final product, I have created a process in Photoshop to “fake” what an image might look like on various types of fabric… This is a photograph taken under a bridge, mirrored and manipulated to create a pattern. I then photographed a piece of hanging fabric, and developed a method to bend and blend the image into the fabric. Now I can see exactly what the final product might look like.
I was standing on a pier looking over into the city of Charleston when tons of birds began flying around. I loved the background of the silhouetted holy city, but the flock of birds was not easily understood in a straight photograph. I decided to get conceptual with the work. I made a bunch of exposures as the birds flew around, then layered and blended them all into one image, aligning the background. Now I think the viewer can experience what I saw in one single image.
I recently developed a set of Photoshop Actions that automatically create a tessellation out of a photograph by cropping it to a triangle and mirroring that piece many times. Of course, we are inherently attracted to symmetry and pattern, so I try to be very critical of the images I choose to move forward with. Furthermore, I process and edit the image to really make something pop… This began as a photograph of a lamp in an iron gate. The patterns are stunning, but I decided to edit one of the lights to look “on” to break the symmetry and create a focal point. This is one of my favorite tessellations so far.
Made some minimalism at the beach today. Then it started raining, so I was forced to leave… A constant struggle I have in the medium of photography is attempting to create something that doesn’t feel like “just another photograph”. I am not bashing straight photography (I love making regular pictures myself) but I believe in order to be “art” one must go deeper, beyond typical.
Here, I am stacking multiple Neutral Density filters on my camera lens in order to block out most of the light. This allows me to make a long exposure in bright daylight, giving some very strange results. I have done this in the past and it is quite fun. This was about a 10 second exposure of an object out in the ocean. Though I wish I had more time without rain, I was quite pleased with the simplicity and tonality of this image.