1000 Words Facebook Showcase Vol. 8

by Josh St. Germain | Jul 27, 2014 | 1000 Words, Josh St. Germain, Stories

Welcome to the eighth edition of the GRRYO 1000 Words Facebook Showcase!  Since the creation of the Facebook group, we have seen it grow and watched inspiring work being posted daily.  We are happy to be able to showcase some of the outstanding work that is being shared.

GRRYO believes that mobile photographers/ artists tell stories through the photographs/ images and art that represents their families, their environment, themselves. This is important because of the level of communication that is portrayed in imaging today.

We want to support the mobile arts community by having a place for artists to share, discuss, and critique (if requested by individual). These dialogues help the individuals and the community to grow.

We look forward to you and your art. We thank you for your contribution to the mobile photography/ arts community. To submit your work click here.

This month’s submissions showed us that the quality and creativity of our artists is growing exponentially and shows no signs of stopping! Last week my wife and I were happily surprised with the birth of our son… 10 days earlier than expected!  Due to my time spent in the hospital and getting us settled in back at home, I was unable to give my selected artists the usual amount of time to submit the stories behind the images I had selected from the group. Due to this, there were a few that were unable to meet the short deadline. So, I am asking our audience to please take a few moments to go view the GRRYO – 1000 Words Facebook Showcase – Submission group and see the brilliant work being submitted.

Thank you as always for the participation and support!

“She Thought She Was Safer This Way” by Meri Walker

EyeEm // Website // Flickr // Blog

Apps used :   longexposure, cameramatic, afterlight, afterfocus, mextures
After four years, making photographs and paintings with my iPhone remains one of the strangest things I do. I say this because when I go walking with my phone camera, what I’m doing is waiting for a call.
The experience of walking with any camera in hand has always felt to me like a kind of “hunting” and being hunted – at the same time. But, from the beginning, walking with my iPhone, with no special lenses, no extra filters, no “gear,” I have felt free, like a child, to look and listen for someone/something to call me – without words.
“She Thought She Was Safer This Way” started with me and my dog, Blaze, walking along Bear Creek late in the afternoon. It was early in June and the long low light filtering through the fresh green leaves was highlighting patches here and there in the gathering dark. Giant thistles had begun fluffing out and the one in this shot was lit like she was on her own little stage. I stopped to watch the wind blow her and was surprised to see that nothing happened to her hairdo. I climbed over some vines to get closer and made several shots from different positions, using LongExpo to gather all the light and detail I could in the low-light situation. The more shots I made, the more I noticed how tough her helmet of hair was.
Many of us who love plants but aren’t botanists carry around fanciful notions that these thistles are soft, sweet and feminine, standing passively in fields, waiting for a child’s soft hand to pick them and blow their seeds to the wind. However, spending time with this little beauty, she used my phone to tell me that her 360-degree helmet was more like armor than some gauzy, fancy-girl headress. At this stage of life, I could easily identify.
When I got home and looked carefully at the images, I imported the best shot into Cameramatic, a quirky little square-format app I recently learned about from Eloise Capet that has some interesting black-and-white films and lenses. Then I used Afterlight and Afterfocus to bring up contrast and clarity in the thistle structure and suppress detail in the surrounding areas. helped add a little unifying texture without compromising the detail.
As is so often the case for me, as I approached the end of the apping process, I heard the image title whispered into my right ear. It almost doesn’t freak me out anymore when an image calls me with its title. It’s like a little blessing. As I said, having a camera in my phone – and a phone in my camera – remains one of the wierdest experiences I’ve had in this life.

“Enlightened Men Always Escape” by Stephane Vereecken

Website

The “Enlightened Men Always Escape” picture was created in the studio with two models. Then reworked on photoshop touch for duplicate characters and add prison bars, hand-drawn. And this is Repix and Snapseed applications , that were used to process the image.

I worked for about two years with models wearing masks to express deletion of the individual and of the human person, crushed by the mass of people on earth. The individual alone and lonely is no longer possible … We are part of a greater whole and our move is watched constantly.

I am also at this time, actually going to make some experiments on social networks for this purpose. And it’s very interesting how people react.
This is my new lab.

This picture shows the characters imprisoned and only a person realizes that he can escape. Because this person, who has a clear face, and light out of his head, is the only one with knowledge. And because without knowing things in life, and the world, it remains in place and imprisoned.

And masks monkeys bring us back to our beastly origins and prehistoric.

We must escape and then show the way for others.

“The City Without You” by Aldo Pacheco
Flickr // EyeEm

the title came after I almost finished the edition and because my love ones are on a trip back home (Lima Peru). express for me some kind of sadness, the sensation of not to being with them for a month and a song of one of Joaquin Sabina (spanish singer/song writer) “Calle Melancolia” (Street Melancholia) that talks about a lonely person that life in that street and he wants to move to the Street Happiness, but always is to late… anyway…. it’s a city without you

Edition :
The photo edition starts with 2 different photos, the first on is a selfi of me and my daughter (Sabina) at the airport the day they left and the second one was of some mechanic games at a ribfest fair in Toronto. For both of them I used Clever Painter app to get the thick brush. I worked also with the selfi in Repix with Drips and Spray edition tools.

In iColorama I combine and mix the second (after and third photo, and re-combine the result with the previous one. as a result of that we got the “buildings”. Next step was the drawing lines done with Scketchbook Mobile app. Finally Snapseed for image tuning, crop, grunge and retroflex filter

“At Days End” by Rob Depaolo

This image was taken at Salisbury Beach Reservation in Massachusetts earlier this summer while walking the shore with my family one evening.

As I was taking various shots, this young girl walked down into the water before quickly turning and running back out. There was something about how she was approaching the water with caution at first that grabbed my attention. I snapped away and managed to get this one image that really captured the feel of the moment.

All editing was done in Filterstorm Neue on my iPhone (the shot was originally taken with PureShot). I cropped the image in a bit to better frame the girl, converted to black and white and made a few typical adjustments to the levels and contrast. I used the clone tool to remove a part of another person that remained in the left side of the frame. Finally, I added a bit of vignetting (I love a vignette!) and that’s it! I like to keep thing relatively simple in my editing workflow.

This image was inspired by a recent trip we took to a Game Lodge near Kruger National Park in South Africa. The experience was amazing. We went out twice a day in open jeeps and saw more animals than I ever imagined.
I took hundreds of photos and the one thing that was constant in many of the photos was the back of the Trackers head (his name was Peter). He sat on a small fold up chair attached to the front of the jeep. I tried to capture the beauty and silence of the open savanna in the photo.
The apps I used we’re Superimpose, Snapseed and IColorama.

“Tubos” by Patricia Larson

Instagram // EyeEm // Flickr

Photo taken with iPhone 5s

This photo was taken at my work, this structure belongs to a machine that generates electricity with gas, daylight shines on the structure with much sunshine. It did not require any editing, just put it in black and white with the filters of camera+

App used : Camera +