These Arms Of Mine
Yes, another Photoshop mashup… but definitely one of my favourites, combining bodies, skin, surfaces, texture, mechanism, colour, and landscape in a way that works for me, and that usually gets people asking what the hell it is — or at least what went in to it.
So what did go into it? This one started life several years ago as a straight studio shot during a session in my Oakland studio:
I like it — it’s one of my fave body images (sort of one of my nakeds) — but it was difficult to do (those are my arms around Lily, which meant I had to put the camera on a tripod (which I almost never do for studio shots), set the shutter timer, and rush over and hope that things would be correctly-framed before the strobes went off…), and it took several attempts to get it right. But I think I did get it right, and the printed version went up on my studio walls pretty quickly (with a slightly different cropping). I like almost everything about this photo…
But I can’t leave well-enough alone, and started compositing it with other images in Photoshop. Over the years I made a small series of manipulated versions of the straight shot; one of them looks like this, for example:
(that’s an old brick building a few blocks from my studio). I kind of like it, but not enough to put it up on my studio walls.
Another one looks like this:
which I actually like a lot more (it looks better printed large), and this version definitely went up on my studio walls for a while (that’s a striking skinny older building on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland near 23rd).
And then I composited the original image with an photo of an old pump I took next to US Highway 50 in Nevada a decade ago, and toned it a little. The result is what you see heading this article — and probably my fave of the series, although I think the blue-toned above one gives it a run for its money. I just don’t know — but one of the things I do know is that I’ll probably still be worrying away at composited versions of the original image for years to come….
