a change of perspective

Last week I had a discussion with my instructor Brad about my working process and some general limitations that I felt it would be good to break out from. One of the things that's bugged me about my previous composites, such as the Emplacement/Spectre/Object for example, is that they invariably settle into a "detatched" perspective, with no clear evidence of where the photographer is standing in relation to the whole environment. As a result there is a lack of any foreground/background dynamic, instead there is only background, a more or less flat plane. 

This type of perspective works well for photographers like Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky, who use grand-scale perspectives without a "grounding" foreground to render real-world places appear alien and leveled out to such a degree that abstract forms and patterns become an immediate visual highlight. 

Andreas Gursky, Pyongyang V, 2007.

But when it comes to what I'm doing by creating an image of a place that doesn't exist, I think it's important to establish a clear sense of scale in order for the viewer to get a better idea of how big things are in relation to human size. I've included human figures in my composites before in hopes of accomplishing this feat, but I've found that because they are always so totally dwarfed by their surroundings, people viewing my images have often completely overlooked the fact that there are figures in them at all.

Because my end goal in making these composites is to create depictions of non-existent environments that people hopefully find interesting enough to reflect upon, I'm always striving to direct the focus towards making my images more immersive and less akin to merely an elaborate display of my Photoshop collage technique. Hopefully by widening the depth of field and including a definite foreground with my latest composite, I'll be moving closer towards that goal.  

new composite

This is what I have so far for my newest composite, which should be completed for the crit next week Thursday (Sep. 29).

I've chosen the angle specifically so that more than half of the image is at immediate scale, the original dimensions preserved from my initial photograph. Beyond that is an adjacent building separated by a gap I'll try to bridge with flagging and/or wires. The top right portion will be open, showing the distant ground below. Hopefully I can complete at least one more composite for the crit.
Textual accompaniment will likely be significantly trimmed down by comparison to my last work. During my meeting with my instructor Brad last week, he made the point that it's important not to let the text end up doing more conceptual heavy-lifting than the actual images, lest the composites become sidelined and the text a kind of crutch to express my ideas. I think he makes a good point, and I agree that it's best if I try to communicate my ideas through the images primarily.

Re-Design!

I'd been meaning to make a few changes to the look of this blog for a while to help breathe some new life into it. I realized, finally, that the whole pale-green-text-on-black was a pain on the eyes. Hopefully now anyone who actually reads this will find it easier to do so.

Watched The Tree of Life last night at UVic's Cinecenta theatre. The film itself was absolutely beautiful, unfortunately the thing that stands out most in my memory of the experience is the bloated gray haired man who was sitting behind me to my right, who constantly grunted, coughed, scratched himself, yawned loudly, and when his discomfort seemed not to be apparent enough to everyone else, hissed "fuuuuck" under his breath. Debating whether or not I should go back and see it again tonight, in hopes of expunging his presence in my mind whenever I think of the movie...

the bridge town belt

From The National Library of Scotland

One of my most memorable Scotland experiences was seeing the Forth Bridge for the first time. For some reason or other I had never seen pictures of it or even heard of it until the moment when my Edinburgh bus drove onto the Forth Road Bridge and I saw it across the water parallel to me. I was fairly awestruck first because of just how big it is, making any bridge I'd seen prior look like a glorified log-over-the-creek by comparison.

by itmpa

Then I noticed that a number of small temporary shelters had been erected around its supporting piers above the water, which I've now learned were there because of the ongoing re-painting project on the bridge. Seeing the shelters strangely clustered about between the water below and the rail line above put an idea in my head: What if such shelters weren't temporary?

by itmpa

Could some form of habitation or development build up over time around massive bridge supports? Imagine a succession of trading communities, each clustered around a pier section of the bridge, perfectly situated to facilitate boat travel between the bridge towns and other  ports. The bridge could serve double modes of transport: it's original purpose as a linear carriageway above and as a more ad-hoc, accretionary artery below.

Perhaps the original purpose of the bridge's design would become obsolete as, say, the body of water it bridged flowed out or dried up (as was likely the case with the Mediterranean Sea in the geologic past) but the occupation of it's piers remained. Over time as the water level drops the inhabitants of the bridge might begin moving lower and lower down the supports, along the way harvesting the materials of the bridge's defunct superstructure to use in building around the bridge's substructure. Eventually only its inhabited supports might remain, looking like a strange procession of apartment blocks (or vertical communities, to use more open terminology) along a dry basin.

by itmpa

From The National Library of Scotland

The above image is from the National Library of Scotland's Flickr page, and the stages of the bridge's construction showing its supports going up pretty well match my picture of what a bridge like that might eventually look like.This "bridge town belt" concept is what I'll be running with for my next composite. I'd like to make a profile of these former bridge piers, now existing as a series of vertical communities, independent yet linked in succession from their original purpose of supporting a causeway now long gone.

This blog is being exhumed and re-animated...

Though to be honest it was rather corpselike even in its days of life. I intend to rectify that and hopefully get this thing into a regular posting schedule that doesn't resemble a decrepit zombie shamble. I think this blog will be just as useful in keeping track of my progress and ideas for my last year here at UVic as it was when I was at Gray's, so hopefully I'll be able to keep it going.

Getting that out of the way, I have an idea that will hopefully improve my creative process. I was thinking as I was walking home today that I often struggle with the stage in my work that involves taking an imagined space in my head and first sketching it out on paper, before I start doing anything in Photoshop. When it comes to sketching, I'm good at meticulous detail but I often struggle with perspective and scale, and drawing out an environment by hand is something that just doesn't come natural to me.

Instead of sketching, I realized that an easier way of getting the right perspective for a space would be to map it out in three dimensions on the computer using a map editing program. There's a map editor my friend showed me a few years ago that we've been using off and on since: Cube 2 - Sauerbraten. On the surface it looks like a generic freeware first-person shooter, but the game also offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use editing mode. In the editing mode you can build almost anything, large or small, from the size of a massive skyscraper down to a barstool for example. In addition, it can render accurate shadows from anything you create relative to multiple light sources of any chosen positioning. On top of that, it's only slightly more complicated than Lego.

My plan is to build a rough layout of the major elements of my imagined scene in Sauerbraten, and using that choose a specific point of view that encompasses what I want out of the scene. From this vantage I will take a screenshot, making a bitmap image which I can then bring into photoshop and overlay with my image fragments to eventually create the photo-realistic scene.

After having the idea, I arrived home to discover that someone else has already begun making work using nearly the exact same process. Belgian architectural photographer Filip Dujardin, evidently having gotten tired of photographing other people's architectural designs, decided to construct his own on the computer. He models a design using Google's 3D modeling tool, SketchUp, and chooses a perspective and converts it into a 2D line drawing. Importing the drawing into Photoshop, he then gives his model texture based on source images he has taken of a specific building. Here's what some of his stuff looks like:

Cool stuff, a bit sterile for my taste but good nonetheless. I've downloaded SketchUp and I'll try it out, though I think Cube 2 will be my best bet. I'll put together a map and have some first images to show pretty soon.