Think of landscape photography with a twist. “Dreamscape” photography is my latest project.
I start by remembering a moment. This one is September 1965. I was nine years old and although now its sixty years later, I can visualize the day like it was yesterday. I swam everyday on a swim team after school with good friend in the neighborhood. One weekend his Dad drove us to Singer Island to see “The Ship”, a 450 foot long freighter that was blown to shore a week earlier by Hurricane Betsy. The sands were packed with surfers and their longboards. It looked like a giant party. It was the day, I said to myself, “When I’m a teenager, I have got to get a surfboard!”
To re-create the memory, I bought a used toy Texaco Oil Tanker on E-Bay for $20. For the ship’s name, I pressed on some letters from the art store..”.Amaryllis”. I added “rust” and graffiti to the ship with acryllic paints. The base is a piece of wood with beach sand poured over some epoxy dunes. The next step was waiting for a day when the water was clear blue and a ground swell was pouring in from the north. The proportions on this first attempt are not quite right. I will reshoot this with the camera lens much closer to the ship to more accurately illustrate its size. The camera took six frames to get front to back focus. The blend showed the surfer repeated six times. To correct that, I used the eraser in Lightroom for five of the surfers, to leave only one.