The plethora of styles

 

I have been fine tuning my arsenal of visual styles. This is to increase my library of ways to convert photographs to differing styles and expressions. This sounds like a very practical approach to sensible work, but it really comes down to: it seems like a lot of fun. I get pretty excited when I hit on a good visual style, and I love the power of being able to alter my images in strange and spectacular ways. I wrote something like 38 new styles, or I wrote instructions for them. These styles were mostly back engineered from images I liked, particularly from old paintings of differing styles. I applied these style instructions to a rather small assortment of images, and today I am only going to show one image with the effects applied to it, producing multiple iterations.

Once when I was really into raku, back when I was doing a lot of ceramics, I used a plaster mold for a sort of crude yet elegant milk jug, and I made about 20 or 30 of these rectangular ceramic jugs. Then I did various raku glaze experiments on them which were quite a bit of fun. Some of them came out really nice. 

I'm sort of up to the same thing here today. And though I think the various effects come off as less impressive when shown in the same base image, it also gives me a useful sense of how nicely the style works and if it might work with other kinds of images.

I realize this all sounds a bit academic, and I suppose it is. Not everyday is as thrilling as every other day here at clerkmanifesto.

We'll start with what is, er, sort of the original image, taken near the stone arch bridge in one of the lovelier parts of old Saint Minneapolis. Iterations then follow...