Tag Archives: leah johnston photography
Wow. It’s been a long time since I shot one of these! I never thought laying in freezing cold mud and water…
Took this photo of my little sister, Katherine, in El Mirage when she came to visit me in February. It was a brutally cold day in the desert; The lake bed was pretty much abandoned and we could barely get out of the car due to the high winds slamming […]
Do you ever try to substitute the fake thing for the real thing? Every now and then in my life, when I’ve grown tired of the struggle, I try and see what it would feel like to settle for a little while […]
So happy to be back! I have been so busy lately producing my friend Blake’s first film, that I’ve barely had time to turn around, let alone do personal shoots. It’s been a very exciting […]
Took this photo in Death Valley at the same time as my last photo. I had always wanted to see the dunes so it was a real thrill to shoot them! When we arrived it was so late, I despaired that I wouldn’t be able to get the photo […]
Took this in Badwater Basin in Death Valley last week. I had such an incredible experience being in the desert. I’ve wanted to go for almost 2 years now, so this trip was long overdue. I shot this at dawn with the help of my friend Dan holding the […]
Recently, I was asked to do an interview with the blog Lights n’ Colours about my photography. We talked about how I got into conceptual photography and how I go about executing my pictures […]
It’s times like these, when I don’t have a lot of new photography ideas coming in, that I’m thankful I have a backlog of images written down in my notebooks. This is one of the first photo ideas I ever had. I had actually started believing that this photo would only ever exist as an ugly stick figure in a notebook […]
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the idea of relationship in photography and how creating interesting relationships in our images helps us not only tell better stories, but create better images. In acting class, the teacher will often ask the actor, “What is your relationship to the […]
I had been staring at these beautiful masks in my mother’s hallway every time I come home, begging her to let me use them. They are quite precious to her, and thus, she didn’t want me taking them down off the wall and using them for my artistic exploits, (which I can sort of understand). Unfortunately for her, I could only be respectful so long […]
Took this video at my cottage this weekend with the help of my dad and my neighbors, including their daughter Erin who agreed to play the lonely drifter for me. This is sort of an expansion on the idea I had previously created in this photo, but in video version. I’ve been trying to transition into video these past few months, and I’ve been reading a lot and learning a bunch of new programs […]
Originally we were going to wrap me up in duct tape, which I thought would be rather painful in contact with my skin, so I geared up head to toe in this dorky out: Upon beginning the mummification process, we realized this would look too shiny, so we went back […]
I was inspired to create this image when I was driving through Pictou, Nova Scotia and I came upon this 1940’s fighter jet mounted in the middle of an intersection. I wanted to create something noir-ish and I think it turned out somewhat in the vein of Sky Captan and the World of Tomorrow, which is cool. It was surprisingly simple to create- thank you to my new green screen!
One of my biggest inspirations and certainly one of the most interesting artists I’ve come upon on flickr, is photomontage artist Mattijn. If you’ve ever seen his work, you will undoubtedly remember it. He is well known for his extensive surrealist montages. I was absolutely thrilled when he agreed to do a Q&A for my little old blog! I had so many questions, I barely knew where to begin. Read on…
This week, I got to interview the incomparable Carmen Gonzalez, aka Soleá about her photography. With a vast portfolio, ranging from self-portraiture to scenery, she is a master at capturing complex emotions with her camera. Whether it’s surreal manipulations or straight forward portraits, her photographs are always beautiful and thought-provoking. It was a real treat to hear her speak about her prolific body of work. Read on…
Jacob’s Ladder (on top of being a biblical reference) is a real staircase in the park in my hometown. I composited the photo I took of the ladder and the clouds on vacation, with a photo of myself on my apartment building staircase in NY. Then just toyed with hue/sat, curves, filters afterwards. For extra drama, I added a spotlight to the right hand side of the clouds.
I used the top image as the main one, and added the arm from the second image to it, in order to better illustrate the line of the title of the image “shadow of a kiss”.