I’ve just put up a new images series titled “Photographing the American West – A rose tinted interpretation of a modern tourist destination” which can be viewed here. Just keep clicking the next [>] button until you hit the cow.
Sepia tint, oh yes….
And then, taking a break from Pop Art, we get ‘Green and red clocks’.
Someone once wrote, and I can’t remember who but I believe that I saw it on a blog somewhere, that it is sometimes of benefit to “fly in a different direction”. Well, recently I have been doing just that, spending many hours, days, weeks, sometimes late into the night utterly compelled to understand and develop ………….. Pop Art.
Pop Art – A visual artistic movement that emerged in England and the USA during the 1950s. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them.
UPDATE: Resizing down from the original loses texture. It’s a real problem for this kind of stuff. Here’s a tight crop:
I’m not quite sure what the best medium is for this image. Perhaps stretched canvas.
Sometimes, just sometimes, I create an image that screams out stock to me but fails to provide any further indication of why that might be the case. This is one of those images.
I mean, what is the concept there? Sure there’s some kind of juxtaposition thing going on. There’s surprise perhaps. Maybe even something clever in terms of mixing/blending contexts. But what does it all mean?
It no longer screams out to me but is, instead, constantly whispering …… stock ….. stock …… but I just can’t see it.
I’ve uploaded a new digital interpretation to the digital gallery.
Here’s an interesting article from Wired Magazine on the new work by film maker Darren Aronofsky. The film, titled The Fountain, started on a relatively big budget which then had to be dramatically downsized. This, and other reasons, encouraged Aronofsky to seek out new ways of delivering the kinds of special effects demanded by modern Sci-Fi audiences. The following starts at the bottom of page 3 of the article:
…Aronofsky’s team discovered the work of Peter Parks, a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London. Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks’ technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.The microzoom optical bench furnished Aronofsky’s film with something neither a computer nor an old-fashioned matte painter could deliver – chaos, in all its ultra high-definition fractal glory. “The CGI guys have ultimate control over everything they do,” Parks says. “They can repeat shots over and over and get everything to end up exactly where they want it. But they’re forever seeking the ability to randomize, so that they’re not limited by their imaginations. I’m incapable of faithfully repeating anything, but I can go on producing chaos until the cows come home.”