Walking the beach imagining Magritte (4/4)
Their memories of this walk will be more vivid than reality.
Motivation (problem)
I am interested in expressing motion or the passing of time in single images without necessarily defaulting to blurred images. The original idea was a Harris shutter effect study of waves at the beach. On this occasion, however, the haze, lack of clouds, and mid-day photography (no shadows / highlights) all contributed to a drab palette and uninspired background. People occasionally wandered through my vista, providing interesting subjects, but any single frame would look best as a candid portrait with the beach, ocean, and sky cropped away. This series of images did not afford a Harris shutter effect image to my liking. I tried cloning people from successive images, but this also did little to improve the situation.
A Solution
After all of this, I liked the clipping mask best of all - without the background (see image 2). I decided to try it in the context of the image to see whether there was anything to be gained (see image 3). That image has a weak foreground image on a strong black background - which is distracting to me. the best approach seemed to be: let the background be weak but compensate with a strong foreground image. Replacing the people with black figures accomplished this but seemed as sterile as the clipping mask. The I recalled Magritte's image "Die Grosse Familie", depicting the cloudy sky in an outline of a bird. From there the issue became one of finding an appropriate cloudy sky image to overpower the background without obscuring the outlines of the figures.
Attribution
The marvelously cloudy sky, with just enough blue showing through, is Nicholas_T's CC licensed image titled Sprinkled. Read the CC 2.0 license here. You are encouraged to peruse more of Nicholas_T's work on Flickrivr.
This approach was likely inspired by Grant Morrison's re-imagining of the scissormen in Doom Patrol.
Walking the beach imagining Magritte (4/4)
Their memories of this walk will be more vivid than reality.
Motivation (problem)
I am interested in expressing motion or the passing of time in single images without necessarily defaulting to blurred images. The original idea was a Harris shutter effect study of waves at the beach. On this occasion, however, the haze, lack of clouds, and mid-day photography (no shadows / highlights) all contributed to a drab palette and uninspired background. People occasionally wandered through my vista, providing interesting subjects, but any single frame would look best as a candid portrait with the beach, ocean, and sky cropped away. This series of images did not afford a Harris shutter effect image to my liking. I tried cloning people from successive images, but this also did little to improve the situation.
A Solution
After all of this, I liked the clipping mask best of all - without the background (see image 2). I decided to try it in the context of the image to see whether there was anything to be gained (see image 3). That image has a weak foreground image on a strong black background - which is distracting to me. the best approach seemed to be: let the background be weak but compensate with a strong foreground image. Replacing the people with black figures accomplished this but seemed as sterile as the clipping mask. The I recalled Magritte's image "Die Grosse Familie", depicting the cloudy sky in an outline of a bird. From there the issue became one of finding an appropriate cloudy sky image to overpower the background without obscuring the outlines of the figures.
Attribution
The marvelously cloudy sky, with just enough blue showing through, is Nicholas_T's CC licensed image titled Sprinkled. Read the CC 2.0 license here. You are encouraged to peruse more of Nicholas_T's work on Flickrivr.
This approach was likely inspired by Grant Morrison's re-imagining of the scissormen in Doom Patrol.