Saturday, July 28, 2012

A Crow on Rail




A photomontage I've been working on for the past couple of days.  Not sure yet if it's a long-term keeper.  There were certain elements I felt I could not control, which seems odd since I put everything in there myself.  Things start out innocently enough, building layer on layer, then changing the blending modes.  After awhile, a certain look begins to develop that I like but when I want to tweak certain things but leave others, I can't find them to change!  Other times, the tweaking sometimes leads to destruction.  Or frustration.

So here's the "settled for" version for now.  In any case--more to come!

P.S.  I can't believe I actually had a crow photo in my Lightroom card catalog to use for this.  Oh, the influence of Carol Leigh!  Before her classes I NEVER shot wildlife, especially not birds.  Now I'm actually LOOKING for crows to shoot so I can put them in my art.  Go figure.

Do click on the photo to see what you think. Please send comments with feedback or suggestions, if you have any. Thanks!

3 comments:

Carol Leigh said...

Gotta love the crow! Ha! The more I look at this picture, the more I like it. It almost seems like a physical collage to me. What you've done is create movement which that swooshy green element running on an S-curvy diagonal. And then the sun and the crow sort of echo one another because they're both strong focal points, so you've created even more movement as our eye flicks back and forth from sun to crow. I even like the crazy colors. Yeah, there's something intriguing about this piece and I think it really works. Lots of energy here. Keep it! Show it! Flaunt it, baby!

Linda Heinsohn said...

Ha! Thanks for the major kudos on this one! The swoopy rail is actually the fence rail shadow at Griffith Park Observatory turned on its side. The crow flew into this collage from Palm Springs. And the sun is a full moon shot taken just before an eclipse last year. Then, of course, there are other blotchy and textury layers such as a bit of watercolor and also cement sidewalk, I think.

Carol Leigh said...

And my connection to this is that I have led photo walks at the Griffith Park Observatory and I lived in Palm Springs for four years. Small world, getting smaller.