PhotoProject :: Tiny Watery Planets

Today was a light off-shore breeze and clear sky with an incoming tide late in the afternoon. I knew these where the perfect conditions to get some good images of backlit waves. The conditions where a little overcast so the rich turquoise and blues typical of late summer didn’t happen.  However I took a lot of photos!

Anyway I then had some fun turning them into little planets, polar transformed circular photos. There are a few communities of photo post processors that are dedicated to this round images and some are very precious about what makes a true “tiny planet”, and there are a few good on-line tutorials of how to do it in photoshop, even iphone and android apps, to do the polar transformations. All this doesn’t interest me that much what I wanted to do was emphasis the abstract compositional aspect of circular format. So it was back to basics. I have used a nifty transformation program called anamorph.me before, and it has a suitable polar tranform function, called cylindrical mirror. This is based on a transform that was used my MC Escher, and is designed such that you can put a cylindrical mirror in the center (which is why it asks for a mirror radius) and then when you look at the image reflected in the mirror you will see a normal picture (ok you have to invert it and work out how far around the mirror it needs to be wrapped). To create a full circle I have used 1 pixel as the radius (zero doesn’t work) and wrap (the angular size) the image around 359 digress (it doesn’t take 360 either). This left me was a small white sliver segment, and I used corel-photo paint cloning tool to heal that and also rotate the image into a pleasant compositional position. So here are three tiny watery planets (they will look best a little larger so don’t be afraid to click on them)