Tuesday, December 26, 2023

The experiments begin

 








A few months ago I found myself confronted with a period of photography in which I was positively obsessed with filters. I used all kinds of special effects filters on my pictures, making them look sort of like paintings, or kaleidoscopes, or maybe heightening the reality of them like they were in the sway of hallucinogenic drugs.

Alas that most of them weren't as good as I thought they were at the time. This reconsideration happens to me with my artwork so often that I have been compelled to admit that the throes of creation can lead our judgement astray.

Well, not your judgement. You seem to remain pretty level-headed about the virtues of all the things I make. MY judgement is the one that goes a bit astray.

Actually, I think it might be permanently askew. It's how I persevere.


Anyway, I saw all those old effects layer photographs and resolved then and there never to mess with that stuff again. 

And everything was fine for a couple of months. But then I was working one of the sidelines of my "Spirit Animals of the Library Workers" series, where I was trying to get them to look like paintings, and I realized:

Oops. I'm working with weird filters again.


But by then it was too late.


Still, I am chastened by past failures, and so perhaps I can keep this particular moth to a flame tendency to a respectable level. After all, I am all caught up in the work on my portraits, that is I have completed my basic portrait pictures of everyone I have photographed, and so until I can scare up some new pictures why not spend several obsessive hours messing with them by using complicated, arty filters?

So here then for your edification is a selection of this aspect of my portrait project. I won't show you too many here, a half dozen, trying, as I do so, to remember that these aren't as amazing as I think they are.











































































































































































































































 

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