Research - Marja Leena Pelho

I was looking for a female artist to research, as all my other research blogs have been male ones.  Then on spotting some work by Marja Leena Pelho on another class mates blog I decided to look at more of hers on line.
Marja Leena Pelho is a digital manipulation artist who works worldwide and lives in Espoo, Southern Finland.  She works mostly in advertising and experiments and mixes her own photographic material and RF imagery with that of other photographers or stock images combining them to achieve what the client wants.  Interestingly she studied to be an architect first and says that sometimes she feels like she is creating a building when she is working on her images, as they  can be so complicated with many layers, layer masks and adjustment layers.
She was featured in a cover article for PEI (Photo Electronic Imaging) Magazine in August 2000, which included a tutorial about the making of the cover.

This is the cover and it sounds like another photographer has taken the winter background scene and Pelho has taken the summer portion and manipulated it in.  I think this has a nice effect and see how it would be appealing on the front of a magazine.  I enjoy winter snow scenes with trees and of course sunshine and greenery is also attractive so the two look a very good combination contrast  in my opinion.  I like that the woman is sitting small amidst the snowy tall trees, on something warm like a bed of sun drenched flower grass with a headdress of flowers around her hair.  The sun is shining on her and also on the snow that surrounds the idyllic cut out scene.  Its surprises me how a scene within a scene can look so good, but then this is manipulation at its best and I would love to be able to achieve work like it.

Marja Leena Pelho describes herself as a photographer/designer/digital artist that specialises in photo manipulation and special effects, and sometimes will create images just for her. She has professional knowledge of preparing files for cmyk offset printing and uses this to print her own images when possible.

 Finland is such a small country, there is not enough work there for her skills, so  Pelho is happy to work on worldwide assignments, as she considers file transferring no problem with a fast ftp connection.

She owns her own Company Quadretto selling her digital images and photo manipulation illustrator services.  When she is not working she enjoys taking care of old roses and perenials that she grows from seeds in her summer cottage garden.

I can see how the influence of flowers in her garden leads her creativeness to output an image like the above.  Money doesn't grow on trees, but maybe it does on flowers.  I have seen another of her images where she has processed money notes onto leaves too.  These are unusual ideas and this one is so bright and lovely, you wouldn't think money was involved at all, only as the pattern of the flower petals. The  centre piece holds much clarity and the way its green echoes out through the money petals is effective.  I wonder what sort of lens she used for this image, if she did take the original flower, but then to me only the centre looks real and the petals look self generated somehow with her wizardry.  It made me look closer at it anyway and was worth featuring I thought.

This is my green and yellow flowered image in comparison, where the petals are real.  The colours are not the same at all as I took this in a bunch of flowers on a window in the sunshine and zoomed in to show the inside of the flower.  Again the image leads the eye into the centre just as it does in Pelho's.  It is not in the same league obviously, and not manipulated.

Keeping with the same golden colours I liked this image as soon as I saw it, because of its landscape qualities and the richness of the sunlight.  It looks like the ground scene has also been used as the sky scene and I am not sure what the objects are in the foreground but landscape pictures do tend to look more effective where the photographer uses a different solitary object in the front foreground. Could they be cabbages or flower bulbs? Either way I like the overall setting, with its antique look.  Its hard to guess what an artist is thinking when they create work with the intentions of satisfying their client's needs.

I also liked this image as soon as I saw it, with me having an interest in moon shots, this is good the way the silver letter is made of the same moon material and glows with some sort of planet in the distance.  the shiny hard surface contrasting with the rough parts work well and I bet there was alot of work in the design of the large letter.   Pelho likes the way her images don't portray all the work that has been required to achieve the results.  So we can only guess at the hours involved in such fine work.  

The planet in the distance adds much to the whole perspective, for me... if I put my finger over it, the image doesn't look so appealing.  I think she has chosen the colours well with the tiny planet in the background being blue just echoing a bluish shimmer that halos the moon, if it is meant to be the moon? It could be a different world.  I wonder what the 'e' signifies? that is of course, if it is in fact an 'e'.

Light Fingers

Shutter 0.3 aperture f4.0 iso 3200

This is my shot of a moon between 'fingers' (a favourite tree stub I featured in the light task) and it does have a blue/green small planet in the background. I am not sure how that got there, though I like its position above the moon and tree as though it was intentional. I used a tripod with this shot perched in the middle of a somewhat quiet road, so I had to keep stopping looking at the camera controls to check if any traffic was coming. I did this every time I heard a car and when one was turning into my street I just picked up the tripod, camera intact and stepped onto the pavement.  Of course each time I went back I would have to re-jigle the camera to try to capture the same position and exposure, so it was fun. I managed to get a few shots with the moon at different positions, up and out the fingers by my moving forwards and backwards with my set up, my zoom was full out.