It's been a while since I wrote here but since it's a cold wet Sunday and I've a few minutes spare I thought I'd write a bit about the creation of this photo which I made for the Man Ray contest.
The starting image (provided by me) was of an old compass.
I had been wondering what to do with it all week and had a few vague ideas which would probably have been too hard to put into practice and then when I was out walking I suddenly had the bright idea of adding it to a sign (to tell travellers the way to go) but other than that had no firm ideas. This isn't unusual for me, I tend to make things up as I go along and it's nice to know that I'm not alone, I read recently that Maggie Taylor does the same thing.
So yesterday morning with that idea in mind, I went out and took a photo of a suitable sign, hunted through my archives for a fairly blank wide landscape to add it too (this one started it's life as a beach), replaced the sky and then started adding the other elements. To start with there was just the sign -in fact three signs as I had another two smaller ones in the distance. The crow came next, the one in the sky which gave the piece it's title, then the trees (Nikau palms from NZ's West Coast) replaced the distant sign. But it still didn't tell much of a story so after adding a few more things and then taking them away (there was a skull there for a while) , I finally hit upon adding the other crows, first the one on top and then the others.
After much tweaking of tone and texture I decided to call it finished, I could probably have played with it for another day or longer but decided I needed to move onto something else.
So there you have it, roll on the next May Ray contest!
