The Orange Bicycle. Boulder, Colorado, 2013
Last night’s program at the Flatirons Photography Club was simply “Divine”–Karen Divine, as a matter of fact!
Karen is an exceptionally talented, award-winning photographer whose camera bag is pretty slimmed down…to just the iPhone, and a few choice apps.
I know this is an increasingly popular genre for a large number of today’s young photographers and artists, but her work really stands out. (I have her on my short list of artists from whom I want to buy a piece.) Visit her website HERE and take a look at her galleries to see what she does with multiple layers, pieces of collected images, and her wonderfully creative instincts. You’ll find some unusual, and very personal, photographic collages there.
Here are some key ideas I came away with from her talk:
–Play, play, play! It is often during periods of play that really creative things happen with your images.
–Try, during your playtime, combining various images that aren’t necessarily obviously related–you might be surprised at the result!
–Ways to hone your creative eye…study painting or drawing, take night and adult education classes, study images you like from other artists.
–To really focus and amplify your creative energy, try a project based on a specific theme, or build a related series of, say, 5 to 20 images.
–Try to define what you do like. Exercise: pull out five images from art and photography books that really strike a chord with you. What is it about them you like?
–Related to the above…Try to define what it is you want to say with your art.
–Follow your intuition and, once again, play, play, play…and don’t be afraid to make a mess!
On a practical note, for you iPhoneographers, here are some of the iPhone apps she uses to create her work:
Juxtaposer, Image Blender, Scratchcam, Snapseed, Hipstamatic, Camera+, ProCamera, Sketches, ProCreate (this last one only for the iPad).
She certainly has me thinking about dumping some of the heavy gear (at times, anyway). More importantly, Karen also reinforces (once again!) the key to it all: the most important thing we carry with us in our camera bags (and it is pretty darn light weight) is that wonderfully elusive but powerful elixir called creativity.
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