Mike Powell

After a photo shoot this past weekend with my neighbor and photographic mentor, Cindy Dyer, we retired to her house to look over our images. I was still in the mood to shoot photos, so when she had to take a phone call, I picked up one of her Nikon D300 cameras with a Tamron 180mm macro lens and looked around for things to photograph. It was late in the afternoon and the light was starting to fade a little, but her camera allowed me to set the ISO all the way up to 3200. Even with the extreme ISO, I still found myself shooting with settings of F5 and 1/125 sec with natural light. Here is a photo of the object that I decided to shoot. Can you guess what it is from this photo?

Coke bottle glass

If you looked carefully you might have been able to detect the eyes and nose of a woman. Cindy has a clear glass woman’s head in her living room and I was photographing the light coming in from the window behind the head.

Here is another view of the head from a different angle.

Close-up glass lady head

Some of the colors in the image above were picked up from the objects that were behind the glass lady, but they have been enhanced by tweaking the tint and saturation levels in Photoshop, which gives a very interesting effect. I shot the photos, but it was Cindy who did the enhancements. I liked the shapes, textures, and lighting in my shots, but she had the vision that the images would be even better with more vibrant colors (and she was definitely right). You should check out her blog for more wonderfully creative images and beautiful flower and insect macro shots.

Here’s one last shot that shows almost the entire face of the glass head woman.

Glass woman head

You may notice that there is more blue in this image. I think that I managed to pick up some of the color of the sky, which was a beautiful shade of blue at the time.

This kind of “artsy” photography is not my normal style, but it showed me that simply picking up the camera and photographing whatever happens to be around me can sometimes lead to beautiful (and unusual) images. Somewhere I read recently that one of our primary creative goals as photographers is to photograph usual things in unusual ways. That’s a real challenge, but I think it’s a worthy aspirational goal.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.