1000 Words IPA March 2013 Part 1

We Are Juxt believes that a picture is worth a thousand words, we tell stories through our photos, and sometimes a photo can say more than a whole book ever could. These folks I’ve picked to showcase today are from the site iPhoneArt.com ( IPA ) which has some of the most fascinating and beautiful galleries of work I’ve ever seen in one place. It is a small community, but everyone there is a true artist in every way. These are a few that submitted to the 1000 words group, we will try and do this on a once or twice a month bases, it all depends on the number of submissions we get. Please visit the site and these artists galleries, there’s plenty more where they came from. To see more from this beautiful gallery go here. 

Curated by Mike H. 

To see previous 1000 Words from IPA.

Spring Is Coming by Lola Mitchell
IPA / Flickr / Eye’Em / IG

Thank you for featuring this photo. It was inspired by a conversation and the weather. One of my dear friends is going on a trip to Japan, it will be her third time there. We were talking about it and after our conversation I started looking at Japanese art online. I have always dreamt of going there and love the Japanese esthetic. That same day I went for a walk and it was one of the warmest days we have had here in Los Angeles this winter. It felt like a renewal, a rebirth. It was made to express this surge of feel good emotions with a Japanese flair. Hope it worked!

Fishin’ for Trouble by Wayman Stairs
IPA / Flickr / Eye’Em / Prints

This edit was actually heavily inspired by my dad. Every summer when I was young my family and I would go camping. Every morning started with some early fishin’. The last couple of years we have been going back to our favorite lake to go camping again, but now with a family of my own as well. My dad always talked about going night fishing on the docks using a flashlight to attract more fish, although we never really did because it was considered cheating. However, that lead to the idea behind this piece.

This picture started out as a picture of Shaver Lake with a heavy amount of morning fog. I took the lake picture into juxtaposer to add the picture of my son fishing to it. I used photo wizard to draw the fishing line and then juxtaposer to add it into the previous version.  Then I used juxtaposer to add the light and shark fins. Then I used Snapseed/Filterstorm to add detail, structure and saturation. I then opened up that image into Alien Sky to add sun, planet and lighting in the light bulb.  Then I used filterstorm again for some final detail work (sharpening, shadows/highlights, etc.).

Unspoken Thoughts by Paula Gardener
IPA / Flickr / Eye’Em

Backstory is a poem I write for this image:
Those unspoken thoughts of past secrets, future dreams, promises made and broken. All embedded deep within my consciousness, whispering their demands of my mind. Like adolescent children, seeking my undivided attention, each thought equally important, each one a burden. So now I’m consumed by my unspoken thoughts…….my mind, my heart, my subconscious spirit.

Walk In Koreatown_1 by Jennifer Sharpe
IPA / Website

My 2 Current Projects:
(Abbandonata)  / (Still In Utero)

Ok about the process for creating this photo. I’ve only recently started to work much more fluidly between apps, and also more fearlessly. This photo began as a Hipstamatic photo taken through the window I was sitting closest to during a bus ride, my morning commute. I captured this older Asian woman passing the bus station, on a very sunny day, holding what almost could have passed as a parasol. For a few days I fiddled around with the shot, I had recently bought a few new apps and passed it through many of them seeing what resulted. First I played with different filters which changed the colors. Then, with various color schemes I liked from the programs I played with – Alt Photo, Jazz, Photoforge, and Luminance – I started layering more. I toyed with several versions of these, taking the same photo of the woman and enlarging her, positioning her differently than she originally appeared, I took one other photo from the bus shoot (a passing column of some sort) and played with that in conjunction with the photo of the woman. I used Juxtaposer and Blender trying everything they offered. Then I stopped for a while. A few days later, I went to a Chinese New Year celebration at The Huntington Library and Gardens, and took only three pictures. These were of a flowering quince tree, and it was a bonsai. Since our family makes a quince pound cake around Christmas every year, which is when quinces appear on the market (Nov-Jan), I was really happy to see what a quince tree looked like in real life, and to see that it blooms – even if it was in miniature. Not only that, but the blooms were in two separate colors (somehow), red and white.

A few days later I got back to my woman with the umbrella, and decided to take these red and white quince blossoms and put them into her picture. I thought about beautiful screens with flowers painted on them from Japan and China, and I thought about their history and the length of their existence in the culture, and I wanted to create a piece that was like a found object, something old, but still beautiful. So then I turned to Scratchcam, and found some textures that I liked, and then I went through Alt Photo again, and then finally found the right kind of frame in Jazz. Like a postcard frame. A postcard with a very old picture of a very old screen, something someone had forgotten about and put into a trunk, but also something that still held some of the original color and could convey this feeling of a garden, spring (it already feels like the East Coast springs I grew up with in Los Angeles), and a lady taking a walk. Since I took the initial picture as the bus I was riding on was passing into Koreatown, that is where my title came from. But it also retains something of the feeling that Westerners have about the refined approach of beauty that East Asia is known for, its delicacy and poetic quality, and since I’ve always been interested in this part of the world (my undergraduate major was in East Asian studies with a concentration in China), it felt like the right moment to honor that interest with this theme.