If Your Grandaughter Makes a Face, Take a Picture.
Andi, a tiny rock, some orange construction paper, tape, and boundless imagination.
Andromeda Gail, Andi for short (6), often makes whimsical art gifts for others. She liked this little stream-polished rock, but she also saw something deeper — a head, with a face. She chose orange construction paper for the eyes and mouth because she thought the color went well with the faintly orange cast of the stone. She carefully cut out the pieces with school scissors. She is currently in her tape period, taping everything together. She brought the completed cheery little feller to me, and while she didn’t ask, I, of course, had to figure out how to shoot it. It’s what a proper grampa’parazzo does.
The first challenge was that the stone’s natural rest position was horizontal, but I wanted to shoot it vertical but it refused to stand. I tried a few solutions before I hit on this one: I fastened the rock to a penny with plastic tack, then alligator-clipped the penny platform with my handy-dandy third-hand tool. That let me adjust it to any position plus isolate it from the background.
The ISO 200 exposure was .6-second @ f/22 with my Sigma 70mm f/2.8 macro lens. You can gauge the scale by the penny platform with its tacky plastic holding the piece firmly upright. By being off the backdrop it is shadowless.
I knew when I shot it that I was going to cut the head out from the surround and mask it for the next steps.
I am not that creative or visionary, so this is about as good as I get. I visualized duplicating and flipping the happy face horizontally to make a twin, then sliding the layers together so their foreheads would just lightly, lovingly touch. I used a graduated adjustment layer fading from the original background at the top to reflect the orange paper at the bottom. The shadow was added to give it a base.
I just noticed he looks like a potato, but Mr. Potato Head is taken, trademarked, and copyrighted so there’s that.
Thanks for reading!
