Until relatively recently, your community was the place where you lived, or perhaps a church or a networking organisation which held a central place in your life. These days most of us belong to a range of different communities, many based around shared interests or pastimes, and a lot of them operating wholly or partly on social media. This phenomenon interests me sociologically as well as personally, and I’m particularly intrigued by the possibilities inherent in on line interaction for adopting different personas.
I’d been planning an image like this for a while without getting round to actually creating it, so I’m grateful to Skeena for setting this challenge and giving me the nudge I needed. Child One allowed me to take some head shots of her when she was home a couple of weeks ago; today I photographed one of our Venetian masks, and screen grabs of several web sites, and then spent a couple of hours doing the Photoshoppery to mash them all together. I’m almost entirely self-taught in Photoshop, and it shows: beyond removing blemishes with the healing tool my skills are really quite poor, and the masking here is a long way from professional. Even worse, somewhere in the process of combining the layers I contrived to shrink this image to a size I wouldn’t normally retain, let alone post, so it may pixellate – in which case I’ll have to get the lights out, and photograph something else! I still like the concept though, and when I have more time I’ll go back to the basic shots and try it again.
