A couple days ago I made some fanciful images with the iPhone and an app called Average Camera Pro a multiple exposure app, of rose leaves dried by winter that had fallen on my patio. I liked those images so much that I made a few more quick shots of them two days ago, processed them and then looked at them again and felt they needed something more...so I never posted them.
Yesterday I had correspondence from an overseas workshop organization conducting workshops in England and Belgium....and that rang a bell in my head. The genesis of an idea.
I have letters from WWII that Dad wrote to his family in the US when he served in Europe and I thought they were just the right material to make an overlay for these very soft and nondescript images with a vintage feel. After locating the letters, (stressed a little over that for a few moments) I thumbed through them to find a letter I liked as a photo subject. Since they are now pushing 70 years in age, they have the aged letter look I wanted. Dad's handwriting was also very pretty in my mind and flowed with just the look I wanted. Then.......
This morning I was reading about the View Project in photography, by Joyce Tenneson. "The View Project is about photographs that mirror something in the photographer’s inner life – images that are personal and powerful, yet perhaps not clearly understood, even to the viewer/photographer" The View is an exploration of why certain places or photographs that have such a powerful effect on us as individuals. What is it - beyond surface beauty - that makes specific visual moments so indelible in our memory?
That also rang some bells....the rose images I made the other day reminded me of the little wax paper pressed flowers my Mom had kept from her home in England and also showed me how to make as a child...
Now I got it, why I wanted to pair the two sets of images together....yes I believe there is meaning to our images, on a level sometimes we can know and other times only guess as to what really resonates inside the photographer.
So that's the story behind these images...now for the processing. I mostly used Lo-Mob on the iPhone for the aged look, Filterstorm for sharpening and contrast etc PicGrunger for some more aged effects..then Iris for the overlay of the letter writing on the processed leaf images. I have added some of the letter images so you can see the original file and also the processed images with out the letter writing. Maybe you will like the images with out the addition of the letter script better??? or maybe you will not like them at all, that's whats great about art! One must really think though.....about the fact that they were all made and processed on a phone in the palm of my hand....pretty amazing technology.
