13 posts tagged “photography”

A great photo my husband took yesterday in Varvakios market in Athens. Very Blade Runner, don't you think?

Jocelyn Mathewes has a nice portrait series of Eastern Orthodox women holding icons of their patron saints. My favorite is this beautiful photo of Liana Lloyd, with an icon of the Byzantine Empress Theodora:

If you aren't familiar with Theodora, well, she's a fascinating figure. Lowborn and a burlesque actress and probably a prostitute in her early years, she rose to become co-ruler of the Byzantine Empire with her husband Justinian in the sixth century, enacting laws proscribing forced prostitution, granting women rights in divorce cases, allowing women to own and inherit property, and instituting the death penalty for rape. See also, "Theodora and the Politics of Sex". She is also credited with many acts of philanthropy as well as saving the empire by exhorting her husband to attack the rebels instead of fleeing during the revolt of Nika.

Unfortunately for Dora, though, it seems her chief biographer has been Procopius of Caesarea in his "Secret History" where he paints her as a skanky ho. However, Procopius had a big hate on for Theodora and Justinian, and in the same book asserts that "Justinian was, in fact, a demon disguised as a man because men... claimed they saw him late at night in the palace walking around without his head" (from here). And one of his chapters is even titled "Proving That Justinian and Theodora Were Actually Fiends in Human Form". Well, all righty, then!

This is wonderful.

Bravo! Encore! More! More! (via Monkeytime, who found it via Look at This)

Okay, this kind of blows my mind (yes, it's a small thing, and not that hard to blow, but still...): In Peacay's post about an 1800s photographer, I pointed out this photo (or here for zoom-able Flash version), and said "She's sort of got this Jennifer Anniston thing going on (though she looks like she's about to hurl here)" and peacay said he didn't really see the resemblance... And so I looked some more, and googled up some pix of Jen, and thought, "Hm, yeah. Maybe not, after all". Here's the lady in question:

But then I thought, "okay, though - let's see what she would look like as a modern woman with modern hair, using modern cosmetics". So I started photoshopping - but changing only those things that a normal woman can effect with ordinary makeup. And this is what I ended up with:

Here's what I did, cosmetically: first I took off that awful rouge that the photographer applied in exactly the wrong place for her facial structure, and reapplied it, lighter and higher up. I gave her lipstick in two tones (and I did give her a bit of a smile, because the poor woman really does look like she's about to be sick, and I have to assume that she smiled, at least a little, once in a while), but I did not change the lip structure at all - same definition, same fullness, exactly

I tweezed the tiniest bit from under the inner, thicker part of the brow, and used "eyebrow pencil" to fill in the sparse outer part of the brow. I applied mascara on top and bottom lashes, and eyeliner under the eyes. I used concealer on the outer edges of the eyes where they droop down a bit too much and on the upper inner corners of the eyes, and used eyeshadow a couple tones darker than her skin tone (as per this photo, anyway) on her upper lids. I removed the age flecks from this area of the photo so she wouldn't have spots all over her face, and I gave her a new hairdo.

I didn't touch her facial structure, except that weird bulge on the left outer side of her face, which is an artifact of the photographer's touching up (he did something with the hair on both sides closest to her face, that I noticed in an extreme enlargement). I also gave her an eye color approximate to what it looks like she might have had, and removed the smudge from her chin, which was either more bad touching up, or bad lighting... and anyway, even if she did have a freakishly discolored chin, foundation would take care of that. The only "cheating" I did was to lighten the whites of her eyes, but you gotta give me that one, right?

Anyway - taadaa! Does she not look like Jennifer? (She doesn't have the Jennifer jaw, but to me, her other features seem quite similar.) You may think that that was me, painting Jennifer on to her, but I assure you I don't have the skills for that, and couldn't possibly draw or paint an identifiable portrait of anyone to save my life - quite literally. You may not believe this, and even I admit that maybe I have some heretofore untapped talent,  and subconsciously affected the outcome, but check this out: I overlayed the makeover image on top of the original image, and asked photoshop to find the outlines, then I reduced the opacity to make it semi-transparent, and inverted it so that the lines would show up white:

So. Anyway. Yeah. That's how I spent my Saturday morning, what's it to you? Stop looking at me like that.

Here's a photo I took today. The title is a lot more provocative than it should be, considering that this is actually  the back of an office suite.

I really like Christopher Cousins' paintings *. They remind me of the ordinary staining and scarification of everyday stucco, concrete and plaster exterior walls that seems to me so poetic - these passive surfaces silently accumulating the stigmata of time and neglect, changing imperceptibly day by day. Natural graffiti is so much more poignant than  the spraycan variety, I think... though I must say, sometimes a wall tagger really gets the feel of his/her medium:

From Ternua at Flickr. Also at Flickr, two great "natural wall poems" (my term) by a user called "only because mushroom asked me to" (gee, thanks, mushroom!). The first one has a link to a nice, big version, but the second one, very sadly doesn't.

* note:In the Christopher Cousins individual gallery pages, you can click the images to see large views; unfortunately in my browser they open in non-resizable windows too small to view the whole image. In Firefox, you can just drag the image to another page to see the whole thing.

Small magical beings in my camera taking photos I don't know about. Seriously, I uploaded shots from my camera that I took some time ago, and I don't even remember shooting this one. So obviously it deserves some B&W slashing and eccentric framing. No? Oh well.

Photography by Kerry Skarbakka from two series, "Fluid" and "The Struggle to Right Oneself" (also here; what a great series title and concept!), in which he uses himself as the model. The site is a little difficult to use, but note that links from the portfolio page for both these series have two pages each.  In this photo from a current installation of his works, you can see that some of these pieces are quite large. Via Joerg Colberg's very nice blog, Conscientious. Fine art photography fans can get lost in this site for days.

I'm just posting this here because I like it. I took this photo, sort of as a joke, for a metachat Photo Friday "shoot your bookcase" theme. It's true, though - that's what it looks like, because I've run out of room in my other bookcases..