Life In Sepia Tones

Every now and then, at work, I let myself do anything I want.....no aim, no goal, no deadline - just whatever I feel like doing. It just needs to be somehow work related. So one day I thought, "I'll blow up some of my wedding flower photos into 81/2 x 11's ". Because I mostly only look at photos when they're tiny, like on a computer or camera screen. I thought I'd make a wedding album. Well, it was not to be so. The camera place said 3 days to get my big prints back...I was looking for a little more instant gratification...Time to reframe and salvage this little excursion. And that's when I discovered the sepia button.

I started with this wrist corsage and then kept trying out all my favorite flower photos in sepia.

I was really loving it - enough so

that I took out the ever faithful rubber stamps and started stamping words on the photos.

It was fun picking just one word out of all the words in the whole wide world to go with each picture. And I wanted to think about words that described our approach to flowers.

(I got the idea for putting corsages in a simple box from Nicollette Camille's fabulous site.)

I was on a roll and having fun.

I liked how washed out it all was.

Also the sepia gave made all these photos talk to each other. It gave them a unifying element.

Everyone I showed them to at work smiled and nodded. I'm their boss after all, they have to indulge me a little bit. And then they said, "All wrong for a wedding album. Brides want to see color. Color is everything. They're depressing"

Then I showed them to my go to guy for, well for someone who I trust to tell me what he really thinks. He's my old art school friend who lives way far away in Washington Heights Manhattan, NYC (near the Cloisters). Giotto, Bosh, Duchamp, or Warhol - he's got an opinion.

So he said one or two nice things. He's my friend after all. And then I believe the word he used to describe them was "flat footed". Flat footed, I'm pretty sure that wasn't a compliment.

Flat footed, hmm....He particularly disliked this used to be pink roseball. Looks like a dead cabbage was what he said.

Okay, so what, even if they are right? And they are......I'm still intrigued by these sepia photos and I want to sit with them a while more. Just not exactly sure where I'm going with them.