Tuesday, April 05, 2011

A touch of Gloom is Good?



'Containment'


Gravestones & Shadows
It's been a busy week of painting and photographing and listing images online etc etc huff-puff..phew! So, here I have two, what at first might appear to be rather gloomy, images taken over the last week. Both were taken with my Sony Alpha with an 18-200 mm Sigma lens and as always I shot in RAW.

OK, Containment started out as a typical study in texture. Barbed wire against a rustic post, all very visual etc. However, as post production in Photoshop developed so did the intention of the image. The red colour (blood?) was simply moss growing on the post but with a click of the mouse the mottled yellow became a dark red. Hmm, at this point I own up to adding what might look like a hand print on the post. Well, once I saw the wire and the red the rest just clicked. So many cues from every media outlets we see. The world of repression, imprisonment and indeed confinement. For the record I'm not a paid up member of Amnesty International and my art tends to veer well clear of political statements but sometimes folks...

The dots just join themselves together!

Gravestones & Shadows had an equally inauspicious beginning. It was a warm day, I felt like a walk and as I passed our local churchyard I was drawn more by the daffodils than by the graves, Still, I thought a shot or two might work? I did like the shadows but hey, it was mid afternoon, warm and bright. Hardly the recipe for Gothic despair!

That though, is the wonder of post editing in a programme like Photoshop. You take an image which (in it's natural state) is fairly routine and well..boring? And you work it up into something unusual and hopefully less eh..boring?

In this case I played with the tones in Adobe Raw before importing into Photoshop where I used some textured backgrounds in Layers. Cue a fiddle with the filters and presto..one image which explores life, death and our obsession with recording our passing,

or

You can enjoy it as a feast of texture, form and a play on light. There, you see, spoilt for choice over such 'gloomy' subjects!

Shirley





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