My ways of coping with the social distancing needed to contain Covid 19 include gardening, creating photos and montages, studying art, photography, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, and sharing electronically. Hopefully sharing electronically will lift your spirits and remind you that the world is beautiful, mysterious, and powerful and the human spirit remains creative.
Montage is a pretty word for composite. So far I use all my own photos and brush strokes, layer and intermingle them with a variety of techniques. I say “so far” because I was recently given some interesting digital textures and I am wondering whether or not to use them. Is this any different than my taking a photo of a sculpture or someone’s garden and including them in a montage?
In this series you will see both my original photos and in a few cases how I “gilded the lily.” To me the flowers and efflorescences are beautiful in themselves. They inspired me to combine them in a way that a floral arranger may develop a composition from multiple elements. In this case I made their collars and plumes digitally from elements of the flowers themselves, arranging, lighting, and blending them together. There were so many iterations it was hard to choose which to display. I left them in layers so that I can go back and play with them.
The efflorescence of this bromeliad is pink and spiky
Tiny purple flowers emerge from the efflorescence
A close-up looking straight down
I created the collar from the efflorescence itself
The montage
The bud of a tiny iris
The iris with collar montage
A tiny red star flower
Red star flower with plumage montage
Tiny orange flower
And finally flower with ruffled collar