The Re-Invention of Allium © 2012 Bo Mackison

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larvae, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? . . . We are all shape-shifters and magical re-inventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.  ~ Diane Ackerman

Shape-shifters? Re-inventors? A caravan of selves?

We are not trapped inside one identity. One brand. We are always undergoing changes, some subtle, some life-altering. Sometimes we choose to change, though that seems to be a harder task. When I think of the many resolutions of change I have made and then discarded, I realize it is much easier to want the change than to live the change.

But I find it thrilling, addicting, fascinating to be a shape shifter, a re-inventor when it comes to photography. I focus on true to life landscape one day, then the next day I seem only able to create a garden of flowers seen only in my imagination until I shape shift them with the help of computer software. Perhaps tomorrow I will be discovering the macro world of a drop of water or the architectural intricacies of a barely standing centuries-old barn.

The garden filled with purple Allium that I photographed in the morning becomes a garden of pinks and yellows, drifting in the wind of change, in the afternoon, and the next morning these same Allium are just a whisper of their original selves, composed upon a background field of yellow and green stripes. I so love to examine a single type of flower, and then change it, following my whims and what-if’s, until the altered photograph appears and I know that is how it must look.

When I see a photograph, and I explode with a whoop of joy, then I know I am creating from deep within. Shape shifting. Re-inventing.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She creates with the camera and the computer.