Michael W Moses on Don Herron's Blog, "Down the Mean Streets"

A friend of mine asked me to photograph a tableau of H. P. Lovecraft associated books with some Cthulhu figures from his collection.  We set up the photo shoot and added in some additional props to fill the image out.  In this case we used a ceramic art pottery staff piece and a Cthulhu, hand painted Delft inspired ceramic box. that I had previously made and featured on this blog.

I was very impressed when one of the digital photos I made was featured on Don Herron's blog, "Down the Mean Streets" on 13 November 2015.  Viewing my image on Mr. Herron's blog got me thinking of not just pottery, but the task of making images of my pottery.  I process almost all of my images using an older version of Photoshop and a few plugins.  Over the years, I have worked a few tricks on my own with image manipulation.

I found myself grabbing together a few interesting props and setting up my lights and the next thing I knew a hundred or so images later I ended up with an image that I liked.  Below are a few of the variations that I came up with in just a couple of hours of playing around with the image.  I call this still life "The Arcane Collector's Cabinet".

The vase is hand-painted of my own design and I found it was ambiguous enough to jump genres from cryptozoological, over to Film Noir, and even to Weird Fiction of the 20s and 30s.  Sometimes being a little vague works best.  Enjoy the variations of mood of these photos taken from a single frame and digitally reworked.

I would like to thank my friend Tex for submitting the image to Don Herron's blog, "Down the Mean Streets" and I would also like to thank Mr. Herron for featuring my image on his blog and linking to my pottery site!