bird like

This image strikes me as something out of a Godzilla film, bird-like in its head, Rodan or some other horrific avian. It is a book-matched image, the flipping and repeating of a photograph, a capture of a Japanese maple tree. I liked the strong foreground black trucks. They feel like the arms or talons of the creature and the lighter background makes them pop forward. One never knows what one might see on a walk-a-bout, and who knows… it may have been Raymond’s Burr’s house in the background.

The serendipity of things is an awesome mystery to me. I didn’t even think of my flight back home today and how it may have influenced this image until I look at it now. This fact and the combination of flying, blue skies, a bird’s eye perspective and an oddly shaped food group, all culminated into producing this vision.

After going out and purchasing bow tie pasta to initiate my idea for this image, I had not considered the bird-like nature of the product until I began to handle them. Immediately the idea flashed across my mind’s eye… pasta in flight. These normally flightless bow tie pastas were not Photoshopped, and no harm came to any of the wheat grain products used to produce this photograph.

A handy piece of glass and my wife acting as C-stands (“hurry up”) allowed me to get under the seeminly airborne pasta and make this capture. Notably, this was the first capture I made, and out of six or so frames, it turned out to be the strongest… more serendipity! More food for thought.

As anyone who knows my work, I have a predilection for the illustrative. A photograph for me is not soley expressed by the click of the shutter, it is a journey into the mystery of photography, light and ideas.

This image from my series “Ink and Water”, originally shot for the game as an experiment of india ink dropped into a tank of water, is indicative of what I am referring to. Yes it is a photograph, with no retouching other than the standard burn and dodge of a traditional darkroom.

The image has a haunting quality that I lean toward, leaving the bright and happy photographs for the Facebook posters. I think it is important for artists to challenge the status quo and redefine what is a photograph… or whatever their medium of choice is. That redefinition could come in the form of technique, concept or in this case… happenstance and directed luck.

Clearly I did not head into my studio thinking I would shoot a bird-like creature. But I did create an environment from which anthropomorphic forms – through the interaction of ink and water – could take shape and that I would trust my creative process and see where it lead me. The fact that one of these images aligned with the thread in the current DPG narrative is an added bonus.

The image is a fascinating combination of bird and woman, connecting in content with the previous image, but flipping the notion of a photograph on its ear.

Bonus: Be the first in our audience to identify and email me the other animal in the picture and win a free 8×10 print of this or any of my other images.

In keeping with Robert’s image, “Different Feather”, I too am playing a different kind of winged creature. The evolution of recent bird images for the game has migrated from eatable – to real – to chrome, this then gave me the freedom to explore other kinds of avians. My contribution launches us on a different flight of fancy, perhaps a mythological or spiritual one, certainly angelic. I used a 4×5 view camera to produce this image and racked the focal plane to make this selective focus still life. This technique creates an other-world quality in the image, freeing it from the literalness of the static statue itself.