Sunday, November 9, 2008

beginning of the lites series | october | 2007






























The images in this post were my first attempts at an expanded form of light painting, initially prompted by one of our daughters pics from a night ferry ride in Sydney harbor. I started experimenting with light painting by taking pictures with the iPhone from the bus at dusk, using the vibrations of the bus, coupled with the slow shutter speed to randomly generate the images of cars and buildings passing by.

















































For some inexplicable reason, the thought then occurred to me to merge some of the photos together in PhotoShop, on separate layers. From that point on there was a full-blown exploration of how the images interacted with one another by changing opacity and color, using third-party filters and changing layer sequences.
















































The beginning images were very promising visually, offering a myriad of directions to be explored. One of unexpected, but not unwelcome, aspects of these images was that they reminded me, to some degree, of Herbert Creecy’s work in the 70s and 80s.



 






















After a while, I limited myself to follow two disparate directions. The first was stacking several images and creating a really dense image in color and depth...

...and the second was using the selective color editing process to minimize or eliminate the black from every color and flattening the picture plane. For some images a copy of the flattened layer was made and then readjusted and combined.
















































Over the next three months the images continued to evolve — more experiments were made when taking the photos by shaking the iPhone more and by not limiting the pics to being taken from the bus. I also started to increase the number of images combined.


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