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 ...
