Leaves

In my last post I mentioned that my work is now dealing with collections. I have just started with this process, and so have only been working with one collection so far. Every fall I have the tendency to pick up a few leaves that I find nice and pin them to my walls for a bit. The leaves actually sparked my first collection piece. I started by placing the leaves on my copy machine and making simple black and white photocopies I also scanned them to see what I thought of a digital, color image of the collection. I have over 200 leaves copied and I finally had to force myself to stop picking them up. Once I had a large number scanned I started to piece them into a large Photoshop file, which is what I am sharing with you all today.

 

Once I printed it out I realized that this is not the direction I want to go. The color and the format of the digital print are not doing what I want them to do, and so I will be leaving this behind for the time being at least. I debated sharing this here, but decided that I wanted this blog in part to be a place to show my progress and thought process on my work. I will be printing some copper plates this week and so will be sharing those with you as I work on them. Be on the lookout for another post soon!

The “final” installation

All semester I have been working on a body of work that was wrapped up last week in an installation for final critique. I had been posting about it on google + for those of you who follow me there, but for some reason never posted here. So I will finally update you all on what I have been working on.

First of all an explanation of the physical images. They are all digital double exposures done in camera. Part of the trick about digital double exposures is that they have to be pretty instant. Once you set the camera to do a double exposure you only have a few minutes before it goes back to a single exposure. So all of the images were pretty spontaneous. I printed the images in various sizes on transparencies. The images were then suspended using red string in a space that I created using white sheets.

The entire body of work focuses on the idea of how we process things that we see every day. It touches on how memories begin to form essentially, and how things of our daily lives begin to blend and blur together. It all stemmed from the fact that I can’t remember anything. It was my way of representing a terrible memory, but has evolved into something more that I can’t yet phrase quite yet.

So, here are the images of the installation. This is the outside of the installation. The space around it is not ideal, but I used a space that was available to me so it worked.

And the inside of the Installation. Unfortunately the images really don’t do it justice. In part because it is designed to be interactive, forcing the viewer to walk through the space to see the images.  It may just be because it was my creation, but for me walking into the installation was almost surreal. I can’t even really explain it but it created a feeling and experience completely unique.

306/365 – Soldering

Elliot occasionally gets to solder stuff at work. I have been wanting to see it basically since he started working, but whenever I am in there he never has anything to solder. Today however, I finally lucked out! So of course it had to be my 365.

And yes, I am aware I am a bit of a nerd.

Become a fan on Facebook at Abigail Thompson Photography. And be sure to check out the Etsy shop I opened with my sister.

150/365 – Screws

I went to visit Elliot at work today. He works at a place called Laptop Exchange, that buys, sells, trades, and repairs laptops. They have cups of all sorts of screws sitting around and I have always thought that they look cool, so today I decided to use it for my 365.

I changed my camera to JPG instead of Raw to take pictures of studio projects and forgot to change it back, so although you all may not be able to notice it, it is driving me crazy.

144/365 – Chicken Wire

For the project that we are working on right now in class we have to chicken wire to build an armature for our piece. Susannah and I absolutely hate chicken wire, but, it does make for some interesting pictures (in my mind at least). I was going to upload this after watching a movie with Elliot, but fell asleep before we could even watch a movie, and then when I got home just wanted to go back to sleep.

Mitch (the nice ones)

So because I am nice I am posting some normal looking pictures of Mitch. Just natural light on these.

111/365 – Mitch

The people I work with are a pretty cool bunch of people. When Mitch found out about my 365 he decided he wanted to be in it, so I brought in my handheld flash and camera today. I rarely use flash (which is why it is not impressive lighting at all), but I figured this would be a fun chance to use it.

This is what happens when you are stuck in a room for hours on end folding letters, stuffing envelopes, and putting mailing labels on them.

110/365 – To Do

This isn’t an exciting picture at all, but it is very representational of my life lately. This is my long to do list. Slowly but surely things are getting checked off.

109/365 – Many Mini

I just finished all my stuff that is due tomorrow. Now that I am thinking about it, I might as well have just waited until tomorrow to upload this, but it is the principle of it all, and I feel better knowing it is done (I am crazy, I am aware).

I was walking home from work today and was just kind of taking pictures as I saw things. These little were growing at the edge of the parking lot by where I work. There was one other similar one that I could not decided between for the life of me, so I picked the lowest number. I may upload the other one as well…

97/365 – Stuffling

I work for a group at UK that mails out medicare surveys (and other healthcare surveys). We have to label, fold, stuff, and seal all of the surveys (thousands and thousands and thousands and thats on the low end). It is unbelievably mundane. The title isn’t a typo…I misspoke at work and it stuck.