Ted Hamiter's Collage

I had a vague idea of making a spoof of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, and then, since I didn't get anything done until the last possible moment, I got this instead. The rabbit was swiped from the Wikipedia Commons, the coins were scanned (since I couldn't find anything interesting to scan), and everything else was from images that I had posted at flickr.com.

I had also thought about making a sort of recreation of William Kurelek's The Maze, and I guess it's just as well I didn't start that ... and besides, that could always be saved for a future project.

It seems to me (now that it's finished) that if I had thought to add some pigs (and maybe a hyena) I could claim that this was meant to illustrate the dehumanizing influence of the oil market in our culture. That, however, would have also meant having to have one of the animals performing some act of needless cruelty on the bunny, so screw that.

For now I'm going to claim that it's an indictment of consumer culture, or something, with a subtext of ecological awareness.



Potential titles (all of which were made up after the thing was finished):

Shopping at ConocoPhillips,
The OPEC Swap Meet,
Petroleum Products are Good for Your Genes,
and
Some Birds and a Rabbit and Some Coins and a Bunch of Pipes and Mechanical Things and Whatever

Gulls

The Trestle in Martinez

The rail trestle over Alhambra Blvd. in Martinez, only this time it's all artsy-fartsyfied. (Alternately, you can imagine that this is what the trestle would sorta look like to a very dizzy person with compound eyes, but this should only be done on an empty stomach.)

More movement ...

... but the camera was moving while the subject held still.

Movement photos in taken in the afternoon

Horse shadows

The hood for my telephoto lens disappeared, and I wasn't able to get a shot of this scene that didn't have glare (I didn't think about using a polarizing filter.) Is there some way to edit the glare out?

Retouched photo

Taken on Wiswall Drive in Richmond, CA, back in the mid-1960s.

Extra credit

This is a photo of my mom's mother back in the 1920's or 30's. I had misplaced the file that I'd already worked on, so I redid as much as I could at the last minute, and the results aren't impressive. I tried to restore some of the washed-out detail, and I didn't worry about the smudges and stains and spots.