You’ve just completed your Great Novel. It’s set in Prague in the 1920s, and it’s about a quiet archivist in the Klementium Library who travels to the 18th Century through a portal in one of the library’s massive astronomical globes. Later that day you wrap up your album, a Neo-Romantic choral piece, slow and mysterious, dark and funereal (you’re slightly annoyed when the sound engineer compares it to Arvo Pärt). Before you get home, you decide to take a selfie. You think it’s the best picture of you ever taken, but unfortunately some joker made a face behind you, ruining it. Maybe you can edit out the background and replace it with something else?
That evening you’re exhausted. You slip into a delirium, a waking dream full of horizons where sky and earth blend in muted colors and layers of fog. The moon and the sea and your thoughts merge into one. You’re passing through abstract, grainy worlds where nothing makes sense.
But when you wake up, everything makes sense: Light Leaks 50 is the perfect photo collection for your book cover, album cover, and selfie backdrop. You’re all set. Your only remaining problem is choosing your favourites, which is actually turning out to be a thorny task, as every single one is amazing.
Light Leaks 50 from photographer Melanie McCabe consists of 5 sets of photographs totalling fifty images. In addition to book covers, album art, and selfie repair, these magnificent photographs are excellent for magazines, apps, branding, social media, posters, graphics, web, and more. As Melanie puts it, “Whatever your beautiful, creative mind can think of.” You could frame one and hang it on your wall, as each of the fifty is a standalone work of art. Taken with Melanie’s Nikon and Holga cameras, the photos have a dusty, vintage quality that recalls the softer focus of film, when pictures more clearly indicated the passing of time, imbuing them with nostalgia and mystery. Light Leaks 50 has this in droves. Some of the photos look like alien skies that nonetheless seem familiar, as if the viewer led a past life in Neptune’s blue-green clouds. Others feature more distinct juxtapositions of blue, black, red, and orange, hinting at Mark Rothko paintings seen through mist. These photographs are perfect when you want to rest your image against a backdrop that blends sky, emotion, and colors, with an end result that is intelligent, enigmatic, and somehow grand.
Melanie McCabe is an artist who understands that beauty resides in the imperfect and unsolvable, in both the night sky and a snowflake’s endless complexities. She is an artist that is always aware of the moon and the transient beauty of meteor showers and raindrops. Her keen eye is filtered through both her lens and her soul, and that is visible in every photograph that comprises Light Leaks 50. It is rare for an artist to so successfully combine abstract images with palpable emotion and life, and you can make that magic part of your project today with Light Leaks 50.
