I blame Sarah Gardner for leading me astray. There I was, minding my own business, post-processing my mobile camera images willy nilly and anyway I liked, until She came along and veered me along in a completely different direction. I’ve been meaning to thank her ever since for doing that, and so here we are today.
I had been toying with the idea of romanticising my flower photography, by adding texture, grunge and scratches to them to make them look vintage and antique. At the same time I’d been playing with the different layering methods in Photoshop Touch – multiple, screen, overlay, difference, add, subtract etc…albeit instinctively without really understanding what they meant. All I knew was that sometimes one or another filter worked better than others. Then along came Sarah Gardner and the blinkers came off.
I found Sarah’s book “Art Beyond The Lens” at Boffins Technical Bookshop in Perth one day, and was hooked immediately. I loved Sarah’s style, her delicate colour palette, the sheer romanticism of her imagery. Plus, she also described in detail how she achieved each image. Here then, were templates that I could actually follow with my rudimentary Photoshop skills, and/or apply to the mobile version, Photoshop Touch, on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Don’t forget to check out her tutorials also on her web pages!
Sarah Gardner is a hard act to follow…literally…she has not just one, but several sites and blogs, dedicated to different aspects of her work. A busy girl, indeed :-)! I shall list them below for your ease of reference:
http://www.sarahgardnertextures.com
http://www.sarahgardnerphotography.com
http://sarahgardnerphotography.blogspot.com.au
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sgphotographyclient/
http://www.pinterest.com/sarahjgardner/
There’s a lot to take in from those sites, so I shall leave you with a few examples of Sarah’s beautiful images: