My good news from yesterday

Dear Wendy,
 
Congratulations on your success yesterday in our competition, which resulted in the award of a Selector’s ribbon by Viveca Koh FRPS for your image “Teddy’s Story” in the Altered Reality Class.
 
Your ribbon will be posted to you tomorrow morning.
 
Many thanks for your involvement, and I hope to see your name in lights again next year!
 
Regards,
 
Ian Thompson ARPS
RPS Digital Imaging Group Competition Secretary


p.s. the story began here

Teddy’s Story - blurb for the catalogue

Teddy’s Story by Wendy North

Encouraged by my partner, who was a writer and poet, I was trying to do something with my images that was about story telling in a visual way.  My hope for this project was that the viewer would make sense of the image and recreate a personal story for themselves.  I’d also developed an interest in some of the phone and tablet apps, in particular the way I could use Image Blender on my iPad to create a composite image.  Often these images were created in the evening, which might account for the darkness and the surreal quality that some of them possess.  It all happened in my subconscious, which has made the writing of these paragraphs quite difficult for me.


Teddy’s Story began life as an experiment in photographing objects within a plastic bag, an idea I borrowed from an article in the RPS  Journal, November 2019/ Vol 159/ Number 11, A voyage of discovery, Anderson and Low.  There he sat for a while, slowly suffocating, until one evening when I chose to blend an ICM image with others on my iPad to see the effects that the change of colour would bring.  I think that the first one I tried was a composite image of Peterborough Cathedral’s vaulted ceiling, but Teddy must also have been there waiting his turn.  I next incorporated graveyard memorial stones, but these are possibly quite hard to distinguish in the final image.  Each time I added an image, the composite was being built up from two images, one of which was already a collaged image.  


Once again Teddy sat around on my iPad waiting for his chance to escape.  He was finally freed by the two boys cavorting in the Bradford city centre fountain on a very beautiful September day.  But you don’t need me to tell you all of this because I hope, when you first viewed Teddy on this page, you created your own version of his story.