Seeing double

When I think back on the countless hours spent in darkrooms

attempting to create [at the least] something a little bit  interesting

by combining two disparate negatives into one print,

well, I sit here shaking my head.  Not a time waste exactly, no I wouldn't want to say that,

but I never was very good at it and I never did come up with

a single picture worth hanging onto.

What did happen, I guess, is that I never lost my love for composites

and recently when my faraway friend happened to post a super cool photo she

created with a phone app 

- an app I'd never heard of, one that superimposes two images, adds filters & effects 

all in about three seconds - 

let's just say

I couldn't download that puppy fast enough.

This app, named Diana Photo,

 has what I might venture to call an uncanny ability to "choose" which images

to stack together to bring out the best of both worlds

and in my case, it keeps choosing pairs that feel entirely significant and appropriate

to what I'm doing with life, my work, and how I feel about where I live at this moment.

Silly, really.

Of course an app can't  KNOW  but when Diana began to combine my dye bundles

with sand & sea 

and dyed cloths were superimposed with tree leaves & blossoms ...

you can see my point perhaps?

She even went so far as to match up one of the [rare] front-on portraits of dear dawg

with the driftwood piles on her favorite off-leash beach;

the very same driftwood she played on, photographed on her 4th birthday ...

two photos taken five years apart

from an album numbering in the thousands !

HOW does Diana know???

Tis not all serious stuff, not by a long shot.

Endless supplies of whimsy occur from the combos ...

dawg as evidence,

bedecked here with her own tail ...

all part of the rolling-the-dice fun & darn good for some fine belly chuckles

[although I think dawg would be mortified].

What I'm really after, what appeals most, is the symbolic double vision.

Hard to put into words ...

simplified, it's about taking a subject I've shot in one context,

"randomly" layering it with a subject from another, 

creating a final image that has - somehow - through overlapping effects,

intensified in meaning.

Double exposure.

So far I've had my beaded world appear

and seen my work under water here in this isolated island place I call home.

These have me looking at kinship to tides of all kinds

real and imagined ...

symbolically speaking, that is.

Here I am.

Self portrait within my watery world,

wondering how in the heck a little 99 cent app could have

brought up so much introspection.

:::

Diana Photo app for iPhone is HERE

for Android HERE

:::

Linking up with the gang over at Kim's place for Friday Finds

as this was truly my biggest "find" of the week ...