I do minimal work on my portraits in Photoshop ... minimal because I think it's more important that people see that they are beautiful and not in need of photoshopping however ... my daughter goes in there and tweaks just the subtlest things in the most beautiful ways
She is an artist in Photoshop ... and she gave me three variations of the same photograph, having done minimal work on them.
There was a huge amount of squawking and hysteria out in the chicken coop this morning ...
Immediate investigation by the Australian bloke revealed the Ms Inquisitive Chicken had climbed the ladder to the first floor and was completely ignoring her Rooster bloke's demands that she come down.
She spent some time up there and at the time of removal, was busy admiring herself in a mirror she'd found.
The lovely American risked life and limb ... well, attack by said rooster, and brought her back to the yard. Here they are, posing together.
This shot was taken out in the cobblestone yard of the big old house in Wallonia. The white background came courtesy of an old wooden barn door and the hat was a treasure recently found by Alysha at the Waterloo Market.
She used cosmetics on her eyes but that was it. What the light did with her skin, was nothing short of miraculous. I was stunned, once again, by the magic of eyes.
We had such fun. I'll put up a gallery of this shoot, and the shoot with that lovely Australian bloke, soon.
One of the wildcards, in terms of my photography, is that I have no set way of doing things ... there is no structure or formula.
Each person ... each portrait shoot, is a new journey. A setting off into the unknown
Sometimes I think about being terrified in these unfamilar settings, working in unknown or ever-changing light, with a person who may or may not trust me in my attempt at capturing them. But then I remember ... this is the space where the magic happens.
And so it was with the American ...
I didn't realise how much I love a bunch of flowers in a new place ... not just in Genova but in anyplace new. They are surely a way to arrive ... a way to feel 'at home'.
The Sweetpeas have been abundant in the garden herein Wallonia. They remind me of my childhood back home in Mosgiel. My mum loved them.
We were up early out here in the country this morning, a pavlova made from freshly-laid eggs went into the oven straight after breakfast. Gert whipped up a batch of his sultana and frangipani bread ... Welcome home gifts for the family who gave us their beautiful house for a couple of weeks.
Now to clean and leave for 't stad. Meanwhile, my beautiful flowers ...
And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.
Keith Ridgway, from The New Yorker article Everything is Fiction.