personal work // blended portraits

New year, new blog post! 2016 feels so weird to type, like we're living in the future. I'm not ready for it. But on the plus side, I was inspired to give the 'ole blog a makeover, so I did. New theme layout, more minimal, and it just feels more like me. And today, I want to take a break from the momming/twin posts, and share some portrait work I did back in 2014.

I wanted to do something interesting with some of the portraits in my archives, and I was partly inspired by my ego sum series, where I merged bits of nature to my own self-portraits. I created some of these images on my iPhone using the Image Blender app, and I created others in Photoshop.

The original portrait of Mio was from a fashion shoot collaboration back in 2014 (which I just realized I never blogged about! Must. Remedy.), and the rain on glass image was something I shot at home.

I merged a photo of foggy woods from a trip to the east coast with a portrait of Kristina that I took in Yosemite. Sometimes I have to experiment with blending different background images until I find a combination that just feels right and looks right.

I love this one so much. I shot this portrait of Kaila in my studio, and months later, I snapped the background image with my phone at a car wash from inside my car. Instead of soapy bubbles, I saw something that reminded me of the cosmos, something otherworldly. In Photoshop, I added the light effects around Kaila's face.

I shot a beautiful series of nudes of my dear friend Debbie, and decided to merge one of them with a simple iPhone shot of a succulent plant. You can see the original image of Debbie here.

Another portrait of Mio merged with tree and sky from my backyard.

I decided to play around with an older self-portrait from 2012 and blend it with a coastline image from Big Sur. I did this one in the Blender Image app, so the image quality isn't great, but I still quite like it.

And now I'm inspired again to create more of these this year :)