Picture baker with a passion
From the current snapshot: "Humor"
Imagine you're sitting in a giant sandbox. The design options are endless. Time doesn't matter. You can experiment and try things out until your thoughts and ideas fall out of your head. This is exactly how it can be for a photographer playing with image processing, post-production or editing. Most people use tools to optimize minor corrections to color, light and cropping. For Ingo Lindmeier, it is almost a personal challenge to bring his imagination to life. The photographer creates his own motifs and always has one thing in mind: fun!
Ingo Lindmeier - Tomato frog
Ingo Lindmeier - Tomato frogWhen I, Ingo Lindmeier, passionate picture baker, was asked by Foto Koch for the snapshot "Humor", I immediately stood on my head. Just my kind of T-shirt, I thought. As telling funny stories is literally in my blood, I have created hundreds of images over the years. My work as a digital artist is characterized above all by wordplay and wild composings that don't seem to fit together at first. I also like to add a cup of bizarreness and a touch of goosebumps to my photorealistic image recipes. "Straight is boring" is my motto. That's why I combine the most hair-raising motifs such as hairstyles and food without fear of contact.
People play "leading roles" as quick-change artists, such as a surreal pop art pocket turtle. I'm a real plaything and will probably never grow up. I still have to shave though, and this tedious activity has given rise to the somewhat more amusing Lawnmower Man variant. Sometimes I just pick up on current situations like Maurizio Cattelan's taped banana "Comedian" and put them in a different context to take the piss out of myself and my fellow species.
" ... I never tire of merging my motifs in the most abstruse ways."
So my composings are not always to be taken too seriously, especially when it comes to wordplay. Many a Veggimal's hair would otherwise stand on end when they found themselves as buffalo mozzarella, a tomato frog or a bread throat. Animals, all kinds of fruit and vegetables are my biggest sources of ideas. I never tire of merging them in the most abstruse ways. Sometimes a giraffe and a dachshund come up and the list of those offering a new home for these cute creatures quickly fills up. A real drawing card was not only a reinterpretation of this common word combination, but also the cute feather mouse from the Fabuleon universe. How such a small missing letter can change an entire animal...
Although people shouldn't always take my word for everything I create, I sometimes take it very literally. So, as you might imagine, the English Dragon Fly has turned into a downright fabulous composition. "Mind blowing" has perhaps stimulated my brain a little too much. For some people's tastes, I have staged the so-called gray mass in a simply horrible way. And I don't even want to talk about the Cereal Killer.
Ingo Lindmeier - Girackel and dachshund monkey
Ingo Lindmeier - Lawnmower man
Ingo Lindmeier - Buffalo mozzarella
Ingo LindmeierLots of ingredients for the perfect recipe
But how to make a KlingelStreichK?se, a PlatzAngstHasen, stage fright or Kiwi Wonder, I'm really in the flour dust. Perhaps you have a clever recipe idea? I'm not a classic image editor but, as mentioned at the beginning, a picture baker. Humor is not the only proven ingredient in my baked goods. The basic ingredient is usually the surreal expression. I like to change my recipes again and again. A pinch of social criticism, a large portion of playfulness, a pinch of tragedy or a dash of pedagogy can always be found in my range of pictures.
There is no "one" approach to how my pictures or composings are created. Sometimes it is a stock photo that acts as a trigger, sometimes a play on words or an early morning "brain pretzel" that wants to go into the picture oven. Then I knead a first rough sketch directly in Adobe Photoshop, combining a colorful hodgepodge of ingredients (Adobe Stock, Pixabay, Pixelsquid and other databases) until the image design is crispy enough... or not. It is often quite chaotic in my bakery. Making the picture dough is sometimes very time-consuming. The difficulty in this step is finding the right motifs with the right perspective and quality. It is not uncommon for something completely different to emerge along the way. Now it's time to fine-tune: Light. Shadows. Transitions. Colors. Sharpness. Finally, a retouching layer is added on top, on which I model everything that is still missing by hand. Finally, I dump the motif into the RAW developer and bake it.
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Ingo Lindmeier
