Portrait with Smile and Eyebrows in a Store

She sold me the paper coasters in Tucson and had a trucker hat on and I asked if I could take her photo but without it on and she said she was vain but she would let me and I am glad she took the hat off because her eyes were cool.

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Portrait of RM with Heat

The brilliance of the sun on her and the chair and the piercing nature of her look were so intense that not only was it hard for her to open her eyes, it was hard for me to not be blinded while taking the photo.

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Portrait in Reflected Light

She was at the front desk, then in the gallery as I looked at the exhibition. We got into a long discussion about the images in the show and that led to a discussion about my work which led to me asking her if she wanted to create some art with me which led to her saying yes which led us outside to take some photos I will use in a collage and also some straight portraits, of which this is one.

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The Hostess

Often I will just play with an image just to keep in practice regarding my Photoshop skills. I spent about 2 hours on this one, just trying different things not having a particular agenda for it since it wasn't commissioned. I like having some time to do that and it is essential for any artist to spend time just 'goofing' off so to speak. Without it your work can become so stale and uninspiring that you cease to do it any more.

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She Dreamt it Into Being

I love doing portraits with one eye closed. There is something so disconcerting about
it at first. But it then also allows you to think about two different aspects of the
person at the same time, and how they coexist. Plus it just looks really cool.

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Doctor My Eye

I went to new eye doctor that was closer to wear I live.
This is her. I wanted to do a collage, but I liked the straight photo so
much I didn't go past it. I had to get new glasses by the end of 2007 for insurance purposes so I waited until New Years Eve day to go to the local eye doctor in my small town in Oklahoma. The whole staff was very nice and the doctor agreed to pose for me after we were all done. The light coming in through the office windows was fantastic and brought a beautiful glow to her skin and eyes.

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The Stranger Juxtaposition #4

We were in San Francisco for a mini vacation and took a tour of the south of Market
gallery area. This San Francisco gallery was airy and the assistant had great eyebrows
and there was an interesting painting with the word penis in it and there was a
colorful potted tree outside and a wall of tile and next thing I know I have a collage.

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The Focused Truth

I saw her every day and what stood out about her was her hair. She pulled it back
tight against her head into a bun. I didn't know what her hair was like actually,
beyond that it was brown. Because her hair was somewhat out of the picture I was
able to see her bone structure very well. She had a great neck and skull, elegant
and regal.

When I asked her if I could take some photos of her I explained those things to her.
She was surprised since she said she only put her hair up out of convenience and
didn't really think it made her look all that great.

When the next school year came around after a summer off (she was a student) I
noticed for the first time she was wearing her hair down quite often. It was very
long and curly/wavy, almost half way down her back. I asked her why she had decided
to wear it down more and she said she had been getting bad headaches. She went to
the doctor for them and found out it was likely from pulling her hair too tight into
the bun every day!

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The Wide-Eyed Arrival

She was waiting for her man, a traveling sportsman, the longest they had been apart,
she had a new car, was hoping he would like it, he was tall, buy maybe not tall enough,
she goes to school full time and works full time, it's been hard but she is excited to
see him, she was hoping she was in the right place.

Tulsa International Airport, Oklahoma
7/29/06

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Post Card #1 - Texas Panhandle

I had to drive my father's belongings back to California from Oklahoma in the fall of 2007. I kept my camera next to me in the rented moving truck and took a lot of photos out the window as I went. The Texas panhandle is one of my favorite areas precisely because there is so little to see there. What that actually means is that the interesting things you do see are spread out, they are alone, by themselves, easy to spot and appreciate.

Sometimes in dense environments, just as in a dense piece of art, it is hard to discern what is there. That is ok in a museum where you have time to look, but on a road trip it is nice to see something coming 2 miles away!

I stopped at a convenience store outside Amarillo and the clerk's eyes were blindingly bright and blue with the west texas sun shining in the window. I asked her if I could take some photos of her eyes and, though she was chided by her fellow clerk with the huge curled bangs and hair, and the darked lined lips and fake eyelashes, she said yes and was a wonderful, albeit fleeting, model.

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The Texture of the Truth Beautiful

Day after day I saw a new addition being built about two miles away from our house.
The houses looked interesting, as much as a suburban tract house can. Finally a sign
appeared showing an open house so I went to check it out.

The woman showing the house was tall and willowy with a decided stylish side to her.
She showed me around and we got in a conversation about how she ended up selling real
estate and her background as a model. We went out onto the little front porch and as
we did so the light illuminated her face in a wonderful way. That clinched the deal
for me and I asked her if she would be willing to let me take some photos of her.
She agreed and that was that.

In the end, after many renditions and much more complicated collage efforts I kept
coming back to the beautiful detail of her skin in that light. The color was
fantastic but so was the texture all by itself so I landed on the monochrome/color
diptych as a way of showing off both those elements.

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We Saw Beautiful - Colorado Post Card #7

Another in my postcard series, #7 from our Colorado road trip in the summer of 2007. There was a great trail close to the home where we were staying and I took a hike on my own just for the purposes of photography. When I do something like that I often am not looking for a single shot (though I find those of course) but I am looking for pieces, for moments, etc. that will be part of the raw material for a collage. So in that case I am not worrying always about composition or lighting or a complete image. I am finding the essence of a place or a person and recording it.

In this case the trees had the knots in the shapes of eyes everywhere I turned, flowers were abundant and the creeks had the most amazing light playing on them. The final connection came for me when I saw this woman and her wonderful dog running on the path. The dog was protective and turned to scrutinize me, making sure I wasn't a threat. The eyes of the dog were compelling and I loved the juxtaposition between the tree eyes and the real eyes.

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Striations of Emotional and Cultural Geography

These were all taken on a brilliant October day in Luray, Virginia. My eldest daughter was getting married and some of our dearest friends took the day off and drove from Annapolis, MD to be there. This is a collage of the mother and the eldest daughter of that family. It includes the fabric from their dresses, a necklace, freckles and collarbones.

Way back when, in the 1980s, there was a very young and stylish guy who came to work at the restaurant where I worked, Eulipia. He was 18. We became friends over many years of working together. He moved down to LA eventually and I met him once down there for dinner with his girlfriend. They eventually married and he became a flight attendant on USAIR.

They settled in Annapolis, MD and many years later what should happen but my daughter attended St. John's College in Annapolis. We reconnected with him and his family and my daughter ended up very close to them all, babysitting the young ones, staying at their home one summer, etc. We would visit whenever we came to town.

So, now that 18 year old kid who met my daughter when she was born, was at her wedding 18 years later with his wife and daughters who I was able to photograph. It was a great and glorious reminder of the beauty that is within the longevity of relationships.

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The Dream and the Dreamer

My photo session with this friend consisted of following her throughout her day, from waking on. I noticed when she was doing her make up that she held her eyelash curler with both hands. I asked about it and she said she had once been getting ready for a date, curling her eyelashes when something startled her and she tore out all her eyelashes on that eye! The date arrived moments later and they spent the evening looking for false eyelashes. They didn't have a second date. So, from then on has used two hands to make sure it doesn't happen again.

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Truths and Things I Made Up About This Woman #14

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Sights and Sounds of the Invisible Heart

Click on it to see the whole thing.

This image is a collage of 4 distinct photographs. I used an existing lamp in a foyer of a hotel in Luray, Virginia during the reception for my daughter's wedding in October of 2006. I simply took off the lampshade to get the light I wanted. Two of the images are of the Model, a front face view and a 3/4 face view that I collaged together in Photoshop. At the same time I took those photos I took photos of her butterfly tattoo and her necklace, among other things. I later layered those onto the collage I had already created and slowly but surely melded them on top of the face image. It took a long time!
It was created using Photoshop CS3. It is the most popular image of recent months. The search on yahoo for any number of tattoo types brings this image up as one of the first. If you would like something done in Photoshop drop me a line at marty@martycoleman.com

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The Stranger Juxtaposition #8

The Stranger Juxtaposition #8, originally uploaded by Make Studio / Digihuman.

The eye doctor's eyes, pearls and shoes said 3 different things on many different topics.

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The Stranger Juxtaposition #7

The Stranger Juxtaposition #7, originally uploaded by Make Studio / Digihuman.

The cake seller at the outlet mall and the cake and the TV image of the flamenco dancer that I shot in the Bose store demo movie in the small dark theatre where they showed off their sound systems which I did not buy but I got a number of shots of the screen that I liked and then realized how the fit and imagined a story of love.
January 31, 2008

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The Stranger Juxtaposition #6

The Stranger Juxtaposition #6, originally uploaded by digihuman.

In the sunset district of San Francisco, October, 2007.
The gallery employee (I am imaging this but she probably isn't, more likely a student or maybe a....no, I think I am right, a gallery something or other is likely) in the restaurant that I waited outside of while my wife went to the little girls room with the shoehorn (which wasn't really in the restaurant, but a few doors down in the shoe store on a bench just sitting there by itself with a great reflection and I said it wrong, she didn't go in the girl's room with the shoehorn and the girls room did not have the shoehorn in it, just in case you got confused by my bad writing style) and the Avocados (which were in the market bin next to the tomatoes that were too red to put in the collage even though the photo had them in it and I liked how the red of the tomatoes brought out the red in the shoehorn, still it was too distracting) and the cleavage (which didn't really belong to her, but to a woman on a bench in the bookstore at the magazine rack who I happened to walk by and noticed her necklace that was just a tad bit too far down her chest but it made me notice her) did it.

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Truths and Things I Made Up About This Woman #2

This woman was a customer at my hair salon. I had just got my digital camera a few weeks before and was anxious to try some ideas. She was actually getting her nails done, not her hair. I took some photos of her and the nail lady going her work then asked her if I could take some close ups of her eyes. We walked outside in the shade (but with a very very bright parking lot right behind me as I faced her. She had the most gorgeous green eyes. I took photos looking straight into each eye so I could just see the side of her head at the same time. I combined the one in front of the right eye with the one in front of the left eye to get this look. I then layered the words, copied the collage onto a new layer and turned it grayscale, then cut out all the grayscale image that did not act as a background for the words. I then spent a great deal of time manipulating her face and eyes to get the color and depth I was looking for.

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