When the long, dark winter arrives and my sun and outdoor deprivation succumb to cabin fever, I’ll kill time and feed my lust for creativity by scavenging the house for any random item to photograph and make look interesting. A few months back, one of my children received a Lite-Brite for his birthday, and, unlike the big, clunky old one I used to play with with as a kid, this one was sleeker and not only had the typical round pegs but also came with ones shaped like squares, triangles, semi-circle curves and even animals. As I watched the kids tinker around with it, seeing the brightly colored pieces light up with an invitingly mesmerizing glow, it gave me the idea to photograph it. Initially, I had started out with a macro screw-on filter over the 50mm on my DSLR but found working with such a shallow depth of field in such a low light scenario with an old camera that is anything but good in low light, I tossed it aside and pulled out my iPhone instead. Completely absorbed with this new-found pastime, I set out to create as many different abstract images as I could conjure with a camera phone and a 20 dollar toy. In order to make it more challenging to myself and to also really see the potential this brilliant little plastic pegs were capable of, I made post processing as minimal as possible: all images were edited in an app called B&W Master, sent to my computer and opened in GIMP for minor tweaking and adjusting, and lastly imported into Neat Image to remove distracting noise. That’s about it. All of it is really just a play on depth, perspective, negative space and varied channel conversions that produced a conceptual abstract series as unusual it is an adult playing with a children’s toy in the dark:)
