Saturday, September 12, 2015

Image featured on BECU September Update email!

I was excited to see one of my images featured as the header image for BECU's September Update email. I had entered several images in their 2016 Calendar Contest, so didn't expect to see them used in this capacity (and still hoping one got chosen for the calendar!) I was thrilled to see my image, even if they don't use photo credits on their email images...believe me, I asked about it! This is one of my macro flower images, featuring a metallic "bee" (?)


I'm passionate about nature images, usually up-close macros of flowers, I've probably got hundreds now! My portfolio features another interesting floral/insect image, in the Animation category. I animated a background for a fascinating white crab spider sitting on a lavender bloom. We watched that guy all summer, and saw him catching bees.

Thanks, BECU, for featuring my photography! (Below is the original, uncropped image.)


Tuesday, June 9, 2015

MOG Vanity exhibit digital assets and book design



What an exciting project this has been! Vanity is a current exhibit at Museum of Glass by artist Joe Rossano. It's an intricate and involving statement piece addressing extinction and human domination and destruction of the natural world, specific to eleven extinct species. Joe comes from a scientific as well as artistic background, so much of the accompanying information touches on DNA codes, historical accounts of each animal, and academic documentation of how they were driven to extinction by destruction of habitat or hunting/over-harvesting.

First up for me was creating digital assets (HTML pages of the historical accounts) in Dreamweaver to accompany each animal in the exhibit, accessible through QR codes attached to the inside of each individual "DNA cabinet."
Human DNA code was used to visually overlay and obscure the scientific name of each animal, signifying the manner in which humans have dominated and destroyed much of nature. A link was included at the end of each HTML page to view or download the entire matching PDF file, containing all the reference material as well.

The most exciting and challenging part of the project was the accompanying book of the exhibit. I love book design, so the opportunity to work on this project for the museum was a dream come true! It was a long and involved process, but I really enjoy the photo editing and placement process, as well as the typography and  stylesheet creation. It's very satisfying to see a completed, tangible end result that you can hold in your hands. I'm looking forward to that when we receive the finished proof copy of the printed book later this week! Until then, check out this link to a PDF "sampler" of Vanity, the book.