Thursday, June 11

Paris 3


Exercise 3: (Color Management, HDR, Composition)

Bike messenger stops for Parisian winter lunch

Street photography's a hunting experience. You look for game, shoot it, then lug home the trophy to mount. As I wrote in the last post, I'm studying Photoshop. In this exercise I worked on three dimensions of an image:

(1) See the cyan shift in this image. I stole the color map from the art of a movie poster, then worked it into the final image to reinforce winter mood in contrasty morning light.
(2) To peer into shadows and hi lights while giving objects a 3D feeling I employed Photomatix to dig into both shadows and highlights and,
(3) Worked subliminal cubist lighting onto the image. Blow it up and squint to see how both shadows and lights sweep from all directions such that there is no spot which lacks a pathway or line directing eyes toward the messenger's face.

Visual tyranny :-)

Oddly, artists as a group are among the most hostile toward tyranny. Good for them. But yet, they are also control freaks within their scores, frames, plots, and edits. Art is about communication... It's expression reduced to essence. Reduced? How about - compacted?

Artists share thoughts and feelings wrapped in ambiguity. Strip away the ambiguity and they become illustrators. Which isn't so much a title but an insult to many. So art critics and experts make livings by stripping off those outer layers, explaining to the rest of us what great artists mean to say. How they came to say it. And how all of that should influence those who visit the art that the learned analysts are unravelling.

Through their own filters of course.


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