Art Inspired :: Finding Faces in Texture

This is a gumtree truck bleeding gum. Perhaps from burrowing insect damage or cracks sustained in strong winds. It suggests a face perhaps not a happy one a disdaining haughty look.

 

So I sketched some lines and used them as my training filter in dreamscope (second image below) but this was a bit weak so I used that image as another training for another dreamscope and then another generation each modifying the photo with a deeper and deeper filter.

 

Finally I took the results into Nik’s Colour Efx Pro to bring out the abstract, just a suspicion of a face but perhaps a little more contorted now a spirit in the shadows or just a trick of the light.  Squiggles & colours that suggest tone and form.

 

Abstraction from a close up on reality

 

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

…Niels Bohr

Inspired by Fred Williams

I have been inspired for a long time to try and find a way with photographs that could do justice in a semi-abstract painterly way to subjects, in a similar way Fred Williams paid homage to landscapes. I had been unsuccessfully trying to photograph a family of very noisy minors in flight. It was late in the day and very overcast and they weren’t cooperating, but I did like the blurred form on one image, The strong shape was both abstract and also characteristic of these birds flight.

Fred’s paintings generally lack a conventional horizon yet that are strongly dimensional, which he seems to often achieve with a coloured almost monochromatic ground, with a few gradations then onto this he paints his abstract often calligraphic shapes that echo the subject. For the ground I figured a painterly almost impasto filter from dreamscope would fit the bill and for the subject I took my photo increased the contrast a little and just overlaid it with a normal blend multi-exposure collage filter in picasa. I like the out-come. I’m still not photographing like Fred would have painted but I am understanding better how to develop the idea.

Finding Abstract Curves too Late

Oh where where you last week for the last Patch Challenge on Abstract/Curves. Oh that’s right I was in a different country. Another sculpture at the McClelland Sculpture Park, with a title something like acoustic tubes, yes they played ethereal music.
 

ThePatch :: Abstract/Curves

Some may have noticed I’ve taken more curved things this week. I’ve been looking for more abstract ways (to please other patchers) to photograph curves and in a flat land with few features, curves are not so common. So a bit of extra ingenuity was required. I tried reverse light paintings (had potential), satellite dish shadows (perhaps not abstract enough). wheels and cups, even lollies and arabian stucco (see small tile photo to the left, the paster is spread on and then patterns scratched out as it dries). Countless other things that suggested curves/

I ended up opting for some pure colour theory fun. I took three images of smarties (lollies not unlike M&Ms) at different distances to get different size ovaloids. Then I overlayed (multi-exposure in picasa) the three images over a fourth layer, a hand drawn scribble of orange curves on a blue fabric background (ie contrasting colours). Where blue overlays yellow you get green, red over yellow, you get orange. Blue on blue strengthen blue.  I’m sure you know the rest.

Looking for Curves when there aren’t any

The wind and risk of a sand storms has kept me inside the past couple of evenings, So I thought I might experiment with some ways to make abstract curves with my camera. I figure if I use the TV and led lights on remotes and other devices. Set the ISO slow (such as 100 or 200) high f-stop and slow shutter 1 to 5 seconds and experimented with moving the camera. Kind of light painting in reverse.

Without too much trial and error, I got some encouraging results, It was a matter of moving the camera as smoothly as possible and adjusting the time to suit different light sources. Some of the LED lights obviously omit a fluctuating light leaving dotted lines. The image below was prepared as a candidate for the final challenge in this month’s abstract theme on the patch. It superimposes two images.

The Patch :: Abstract Lines

I find myself in the middle of the Saudi Arabian Desert this week and there is not an obvious lot to photograph. There is of course the horizon, its a strong line (except in a dust storm) its incredibly flat and feature less. There is the road in, which is very straight and does have some lamp posts near the camp, some of  the lights actually work. There are some low lying scrubby bushes but nothing particularly linear so I went looking for strong shadows and the hot sun here does create strong shades of anything brave enough to stand up.

Seems the building are the one thing brave enough, so I set about taking photos of various different parts of the camp in the morning and/or evening. The sun rise quickly over head here so there are only short periods after dawn and before sunset that you get an decent length to the shadow (dust storms permitting). It the end I found the photo of my own accommodation gave me the best abstract lines (note there are no external windows and very thick walls)

The Patch :: In Search of Abstract Shapes

The Sun has been hiding the past few days, so I took the opportunity of a break in the clouds to head for the wonderful park of sculptures beside the Monash Gallery of Art. I have photographed some of the wonderful shapes before and figured they could make perfect abstract subjects. The photo above was taken straight up against one of the metal obelisks, the bird was a bonus. There are some more photos on my google+ stream. Whilst I enjoyed the challenge I realized I was just using someone else's creation. 

I figured I need to create what was an abstraction to me. I like photographing the natural world, it is man made objects that seem the real abstraction to me. So I decided to make my own abstract using everyday things in a combination of natural and artificial light,

Rain on the Duco

Created with OnOne Cross Process Blue preset in Lightroom followed by Comic Book Vignette in Picasa 

The Patch :: towards abstraction in colour

This months theme in the patch is abstract and the weekly sub theme is colours. Seemed like a perfect candidate to get deep into post processing,  Whilst I don’t mind refinement and some enhancing I just feel I need to rebel against overuse of “photoshop trickery” (it isn’t all done in photoshop by the way, there also are a lot of horrid “art” filters on mobile phone apps to blame as well).  Don’t get me wrong the right modification and refinement can completely alter an image and make it come alive, but maybe not for me this week. So I figured to be different I should keep the post processing minimal and go for an unusual take on something familiar. I enjoyed experimenting with shots taken without a lens and the subtle patterns and gradations of refracted light. This reminded me colour is just light. More specifically how we see certain wave lengths of light. The purest colours are there in any rainbow, just how to capture them. So I tried out a number of common reflected and translucent object with light bouncing off or passing through them. The I came upon an old CD pinned to my studio noticeboard that I had put through a shredder for a unrealized collage project and it showed wonderful rainbow refractions when lit at the right angles. So with the crinkle cut CD on the floor against the window I got out my macro/telephoto 70-300mm lens, opened up the f-stop and zoomed right in.

PhotoProject :: Taking Photos without a Lens

I have had a bit of fun experimenting with ways to get abstract images from my camera so I took the lens off and took a few test shots. Basically all you get is a fuzzy blur, with just a hint of any sharp lines, nothing like a lytro, but they can be beautifully gradations across tones and colours. Assembling some of them into a simple tilled collage helps emphasis this simple beauty.

I am also experimenting here with the publishing service in lightroom and flickr as an alternative to google+ to publish images to my blog.

What & Where am I?

For those that enjoyed my previous Melbourne Abstractions. 

Do you know what this is and where it is in Melbourne?

PhotoFriday :: Activity

The Great Mollusc Stampede on the mudflats at low tide,
ac·tiv·i·ty Noun The condition in which things are happening or being done. Busy or vigorous action or movement.
For PhotoFriday‘s topic Activity

PhotoProject :: Squares

  

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)
  

PhotoProject :: Always Handy

Continuing Yesterday's mobile abstraction challenge. This time all steps, shot, edit & share, all performed on my phone.

TextFilters over CameraPhone Images

These found abstractions of the same sculpture outside the monash gallery of art where taken with three different camera phones. I was thoroughly enjoying the experimental mobile photography workshop with Misho Baranovic, especialy the Shoot,Edit,Share message. Whilst the photowalk task was to take a background texture and overlay it over a subject, all on the phone. I tried a few Aviary filters, on my android, and they remined me of the Alchemy add on to corel paint.. Thus I have cheated by uploading my images to a computer and doing the text-brush filter on the computer, not the phones, but I like the result,

Windy Small World

A cormorant sheltering from the wind has been polar transformed with Photoshop Elements, to create a windy tiny planet.

Abstraction via Long Exposure with Movement

I visited an interesting exhibition on Photographic Abstraction current on at the Monash Gallery of Art. What struck me most was the wide range of approaches and techniques and yet how strongly they followed photographic traditions. Then the realization that I had taken many similar photos as experiments, textural context and possibly specifically with a screen wallpaper in mind. Just last week I in fact played around with the idea of taking a very long exposure but moving the camera during the last part of the exposure. The image below is taken on a dark night, with a couple of house lights in the distance, Using a 30 second exposure I moved the camera to point at a street light (just off the original aspect). Resulting is some superimposed horizontal stripes of light in an abstract composition.

PhotoProject :: Another Urban Abstraction

I’m in Toronto, which is a city of high rise buildings, carparks, freeways, flyovers and on/off ramps and even more high rise buildings under construction. So at street level there are not too many picturesque vistas. Which is the prefect opportunity to switch over to looking for something different to photograph, and lately I have been starting to see the urban landscape in terms of an abstract composition challenge. So suddenly I have many subjects to photograph again. This view of a largely deserted office block in the evening is a strong grid that lends itself some strong abstract treatment. I first used the heat map filter in picasa then onto the polar transform in anamorph me.

PhotoProject :: Urban Abstract

Into the daylight. Taken with an android camera phone.

For PhotoFriday's topic inner city