About Natures-Illusions

This series of work involves gathering various natural rocks from all over the world that have been cut, polished and rendered in a single dimension by lapidary skills.  I then take the rock’s image and capture it’s natural colors, composition, texture, and translucency digitally.  Using many digital capture techniques, we are able to delve deeply into the stone to bring out minute details that create beautiful illusions of what lays hidden inside the stone.  Creating dynamic images and digitally printing them on fine art, photographic and various display media produce intriguing images in my canvas of illusion for the viewer to enjoy!

About Dennis Halley, Digital Photographic Artist

Growing up, I had to learn how to see the world around me in a different way, as one of my eyes was damaged in a childhood accident.  Colors, composition and natural beauty were quite often what I focused on.  Early on, I developed an interest in drawing, painting and photography as vehicles to document the way I saw my day-to-day environment and learned to express these images in many ways on different media and technologies as my creative skills developed.  I found myself drawn to the art room in school where I could create images being mentored by my instructors and traditional studies of various print making techniques.  Gradually, my photographic skills led to shooting with large 8 x 10 and 4 x 5 view cameras and experimenting with many different printing techniques during over 35 years of working in darkrooms and then evolving to digital print studios.  Today, I utilize all of this life’s experience to capture and compose unique abstract images of our natural world around us by creating dynamic illusions of what is surrounding us in our visual environment.

Introduction to Natures-Illusions

We all live in our world of reality of what surrounds us in our day to day lives as we perceive it.

Careful observation of what is naturally around us during these moments we experience can yield many unique details in these surroundings.  Looking closely at the sky above us, the natural beauty around us and the earth that we walk on open up our world to a fresh viewpoint.  

Peeling back the layers and looking deep inside our earth, there are hidden treasures of natural illusions buried inside the geology of our world.  For centuries, man has constructed large architectural beauty from stone and coveted many of the smaller gems, minerals and natural creations that the earth has held inside it.  This fascination with mother earths treasures still continues.

The skills of miners, lapidary craftsmen, gemologists, collectors and merchants have all been traded for these objects of beauty.  Each stone from the earth is unique.  Looking inside these stones, we see a story waiting to be told. By capturing the beauty inside many of earths minerals, we are able to bring out the story and make it into a unique canvas of beauty to behold and view.  

Thus, Natures-Illusions was created by traveling into the stone to capture the mystery, beauty and story deep inside our earth’s treasures for you to enjoy!