Sunset yesterday, through my living room window
On bitter cold days like yesterday, my photographic world is often limited to what I see through the windows of our house or inside my house. But still I find beauty and inspiration
Fresh new snow covered our backyard, the pond and the park beyond.
I love the way the ice rink shoveled by our neighbors shows up as an almost perfect rectangle on the pond, and the way the drifts of shoveled snow around the rink create a sort of frame around the rink.
Sharpening the Saw
I’ve been studying the photography of Wendi Schneider. She takes ordinary scenes in nature and turns them into something sublime by printing her photographs on vellum paper or mulberry paper and then embossing them with gold leaf applied to the back of the printed image. The combination of the texture of the paper, the paper’s transparency, and the gold leaf creates soft, impressionistic images touched with light.
I am thinking about whether I want to learn to print my photographs on vellum and try my hand at embossing with gold leaf. If I could find a photographer to teach me the skills I’d jump at the chance. But I’m not sure whether I want to learn through trial and error.
In the meantime, yesterday I played with what I had, seeing whether I could create a sense of depth and texture using layers in Photoshop. I made a photograph of the texture of paint on the wall in the hallway.
Trying New Techniques
It’s not very interesting to look at. But it has lovely texture for layering in Photoshop. In the backyard scene above, I added a layer of the wall photo on top of the image in Photoshop, set the blend mode to multiply so that the texture came through, brightened the image a bit and then made a toned image using a tool called Silver Efex. I liked it well enough that I spent hours experimenting with other images I have made in the past, layering on the wall texture photo and toning the images using Silver Efex.
This morning I continued my experiments, learning what types of images work well and which ones don’t work well.
I plan to continue my experiments and explorations by painting textures on watercolor paper, photographing them, and then using the images as layers in Photoshop. I would like to eventually create a series of images all made in my neighborhood and through my windows looking out at the neighborhood. But I want them to feel soft and textured, a little bit impressionistic.
Real Winter has set in
The weather of the past week tells me that finally real winter has arrived. The bitter cold and white covered ground will be with us for some time. For me, it’s a time to stay inside more, rest more, and create only what I feel like creating.
Rest is winter’s medicine. Everything around us is reminding us what we need to be doing: Going slow. Doing less. Consuming less. Replenishing and resting more. And not beating ourselves up for doing so.— @morningaltars on Instagram
Are you also staying inside more my friends? Is this a good time for sharpening the saw in your creative life?
As this year of 2021 ends, I wish you all a time of rest, recovery, replenishing, and loving self-care.
May you walk in beauty.
Sunset yesterday
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