Aoife Hester | Toytown Bray
‘Toytown Bray’
Exhibition of works by Aoife Hester.
Monday 4th July – Sunday 17th July 2016
Signal Arts Centre is delighted to be exhibiting works by the photographer Aoife Hester.
“Toytown Bray” aims to recreate Bray town as a miniature/model toy-like town through the use of “tilt-shift” photography. Tilt-shift photography is an effect which involves using selective focus to create miniature-like scenes. The effect is demonstrated in my video: Bray Beach Toytown .
Aoife Hester is a Bray-based photographer who specialises in landscapes, time-lapse photography and photo manipulation. Aoife started to experiment with tilt-shift photography in the summer of 2014, taking advantage and making use of the vibrant, busy scenes on the seafront as the Summer Festival was in full swing. Tilt-Shift photography, works very well when used to capture busy scenes with lots of people, colour and movement. The busy, colourful carnival rides, market stalls, marquee tents, cars and people helped to create the photographs which lead on to inspire this exhibition. In the summer of 2014, Aoife’s “Bray Beach Toytown” video received a lot of recognition online via social media. As well as being nominated in the Nikon Film Festival, it was also featured in the International Motion Festival in Cyprus.
When not working at her day job as a graphic designer, she likes to get out and shoot as often as she can. Aoife started out with a particular interest in landscape photography and spent a lot of time shooting scenes locally around the Wicklow Mountains.
While studying in college, she got a part-time job working in a photo lab where she was introduced to the world of Photoshop. When the shop was quiet, she would spend her time working on photo retouching and restorations, which she quickly began to develop a keen interest for. As her fascination with Photoshop grew, Aoife started to experiment with photo manipulations – creating quirky, surreal and fun scenes. Inspired by photographer Erik Johansson’s photo manipulation work, she aims to make scenes that are impossibly real, yet seamlessly done causing the viewers to really struggle to see what is fake and what is in fact legitimate.
In July 2015, Aoife won Bronze in the Open category of the Irish Times Amateur Photographer of The Year awards. She was honoured to be involved with such a huge competition again, having also won first place in the Travel category in 2012.
See more at www.aoifehesterphotography.com
Opening Reception: Thursday 7th July 7 – 9 pm