Tag Archives: coping with change

Altered Horizons 63

Altered Horizons 63 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with change.

Not all landscapes are calming scenes. Last week I combined contrasting textures to create a peaceful effect, but this week I chose two different scratchy textures to highlight the tension. This kinda reflects my rough week of dealing with the heat, loss of the internet and then power, my dog falling and failing, and the television breaking. Nothing earth-shattering. But it all added up to an uncomfortable edginess.

The foreground of this fabricated landscape is a pile of dried grasses that I tinted blue in Photoshop, and the sky is the negative image of a Shagbark Hickory tree trunk laid on its side and turned bluish as well.

 

Altered Horizons 63

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Altered Horizons 62

Altered Horizons 62 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes during the heatwave to distract herself from loneliness and depression.

The reflection of the sun on my pond always teases me to photograph its sparkling, sometimes blinding, beauty. The problem is I usually over-expose the whole picture just trying to capture, on film, the beautiful patterns the sun makes on the rippled water. So here I inverted the image into its negative in Photoshop, turning the bright whites into black. Then I changed the colors from the blue-greens of the water to a pale pink sky. Enthralled with contrasting textures, I condensed a large heap of dried grasses into the land for this fabricated landscape.

Shut up in the house during the hottest days of the heatwave, I find creating landscapes in Photoshop to be a great distraction from loneliness and depression.

 

Altered Horizons 62

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Altered Horizons 61

Altered Horizons 61 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with loss.

Another combination of algae and peony. In Photoshop there’s this great command that allows you to change the hue, intensity, and lightness of the colors in your photograph. There was something so satisfying about turning my pink peony and greenish algae into a fabricated landscape of blue twilight. I like to imagine walking in the dusty blue valley as a pale blue moon rises.

Altered Horizons 61

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Altered Horizons 59

Altered Horizons 59 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with loss.

In the quiet dark of a summer night, fireflies twinkle like stars. Much folklore and symbolism related to death surround fireflies, also known as lightening bugs. There was a Victorian superstition that if a firefly was spotted in the house, someone would die soon. In Japanese legends fireflies are the souls of the dead, particularly of warriors who had fallen in battle. Some say that gazing into a field of fireflies, one can feel the presence of lost loved ones.

My camera couldn’t capture the flickering and flashing dances of the fireflies. So, creating this fabricated landscape in Photoshop, I painted tiny white lights over images of algae sheets raked from my pond. I topped it off with a photo of the pond reflecting the sun and clouds.

 

 

Altered Horizons 59

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Altered Horizons 58

Altered Horizons 58 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with change.

This is the hosta plant that faithfully, magnificently, takes over a good portion of my garden year after year even though I do nothing to help or encourage it. In late summer, if left on its own as it always is, the hosta will sprout tall shoots topped with pale lavender-colored flowers. This is the hosta as photographed in early June before something nibbled its leaves down to bare little stumps. I’m not at all sure what this means for its future. So I decided to memorialize the poor plant, in a fabricated landscape, making it into a golden hill. In Photoshop, I added a picture of the sun reflected in my pond, along with a negative image of tangled straw-like weeds to make an agitated sky.

 

Altered Horizons 58

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Altered Horizons 57

Altered Horizons 57 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricatesd landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with loss.

I was thinking of my father when I fabricated this landscape. All day yesterday, as I weed-whacked up and down my long driveway and then raked and pulled pondweed, I remembered how pleased my father was to do work around his house. He taught me that it’s a privilege to have a nice home and to keep it in good shape. He had come to the States in the early 1940s with nothing but ambition; he worked hard to build up his dreams. When I do yard work around my home I feel like he’s watching me.

In Photoshop, I turned the reflection of a bare tree upside down and “planted” it in a foreground of pebbles. The image was not good enough to honor or represent my father so I framed it in multiple built-up frames, like the biggest hug I could give.

 

Altered Horizons 57

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