Dahlia Blossom

 

OK, I’ll admit it – I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing for my book project – editing the text one final time – but I had to play around with this Dahlia I photographed recently! Besides if the process worked, I wanted to include it in one of the chapters of the book. So it’s justified, truly, really it is, I’m not just avoiding work…

Back in the film days – sounds like an old movie story – I used to love working with Polaroid SX-70 film, and mushing it around while it was developing. Some of you might recall the technique; some of you might have loved it as much as I did! It just gave a different expression to the images that I made. But commercially, I wasn’t finding much use for it, and at that time, I was focused more on commercial than fine-art work. I kept at it to a degree, to feed my artistic sensibilities, but when the film was discontinued, the first time, I let the process go and moved on to other things.

So how did I do this one? I simply used the Liquify tool in Photoshop. That’s it; it took me about a 45 minutes – oh wait, I should say 4 hours! But seriously it did not take as long as I thought it might. Colleagues of mine had used this tool in PS before, but I just assumed it had taken them hours to get results. Perhaps on some images it does.

I’m pretty happy with the results – enough to look at other flowers I’ve photographed now and play around with them – but after the book goes to press!