Vanessa Petri

Vanessa Petri is a photographer from Australia who has started her own business which combines her love of photography and her love of fairies. She takes children's and family portraits and uses Photoshop and photo editing to put them onto magical and mystical looking backgrounds. Here are some examples of her work.

Objectively, this image shows a wooden desk with six old fashioned books separated into two piles. One pile has four books, and one has two books. On the top of the pile of two books there is a candle stick holder with a lit candle which lights up the main focus of the picture. On the top of the pile of four books, there is a fairy sitting on the top. The fairy is wearing a white dress. Her hair is shoulder-length and brown. Her wings are also white and they match her dress. She is looking to the left (the right for her) and there is a sparkle coming from the top of one of her wings. There is a pocket watch in front of the pile of four books.

This photo looks like something from a children's fairytale.

In her work, she makes the people in the photo a lot smaller than the background features, giving the illusion of fairies, and something that could come straight from the pages of children's fairy tale or imagination. This is something that I wanted to incorporate into my work.

For my photo shoot, I wanted to use the story of Thumbelina. This is a story of a girl who is extremely tiny, and no bigger than somebody's thumb.

I chose to use Vanessa's technique of Photo shopping myself into background to make myself look tiny. I used self-portrait photos and cut them out of one image and put them onto another.

My attempt:

This is my attempt at achieving photos similar to Petri. These are the three that I feel worked out the best. I used a bit of self-portrait to take pictures of myself and then I photoshopped myself into deferent scenarios. For these photos I photoshopped myself with an old teddybear that belonged to my granddad, onto a mushroom in the forest, and into a jar. Although I am pleased with these pictures, I feel that it looks a bit too photoshopped. It was hard to get the brightness and contrast the same and make the photographs look realistic. For my next shoot, I will definitely use less photo editing and less photoshop.