I think my propensity to dream, however, gets me into trouble. I know I drive my wife Mary nuts. She is constantly reminding me to watch the road when we're driving together. My mind is constantly moving. I'm forever dreaming up new ideas. Mary loves to tell the story about how I have endeavored to take on new projects that never actually get started. Once I was going to take up the piano again. We even hauled a piano up from Ashland once for that very purpose. But it just never happened. She also brings up the time I had decided to take up painting. She bought me a starter kit, complete with a small canvas, a few tubes of paint, and a few different sized brushes. It collected dust. Then there was the time I was going to take up model building. I bought a model (one of those aircraft carriers), and I did actually work on it. But it was never finished, and to this day, I do not know where that model is. It's likely taking up landfill space somewhere now.
One dream I always return to, however, is my dream of making cool images with a camera. Photography was the one dream that actually fit into my creative flow. I never could draw with a pencil. But for some reason, I took to drawing with light.
Making cool images. Those three words seem to be where I have always landed. When I enlisted in the Navy, photography was the goal. The Navy's photography schools were the best, according to the recruiters. I took them at their word, and enlisted in the Navy. They were right. I gained a great deal of knowledge and experience as a Photographer's Mate in the United States Navy. The only problem was, I was still a dreamer. Now this is not to say that dreaming is a bad thing. You just want to balance it with the other important things in life. This is partly why I didn't fit into the lifestyle of the military. Dreamers are not in high demand. Uncle Sam wants doers.
Here is an image of August Sigur and I, where the purpose of the image is, again, best described with those three words. Making cool images.
The idea was to make it appear as though the rolls of film were flying out of the cameras. We used a thin string thread through the film spool, and strung up to the false ceiling above. Then we photographed the scene a bit darker than normal, in an effort to help hide the string from the final image. If only we had the clone stamp tool back then. But the dark background, and the low light on the scene in the final print, seemed to do a pretty good job of hiding the string. If you look closely though, you can see the string on the film cannister on the right.
That photograph was captured in 1990. Here we are now, in the year 2010. Twenty years later, and I'm still stringing up objects in my effort to make cool images. Ever the dreamer.
Recently, I was driving over to one of the county buildings I provide computer network services for. I was troubleshooting a DSL circuit. Anyway, the parking lot for this building is not paved, and in the middle of this field of dirt, lay this old wrench. I can't imagine how it got there. The tool is likely an antique. But it must have dropped out of someone's old pickup and there it lay for who knows how long, until it caught my eye. The shape of the tool reminded me of some of the images I had been working on that year. Twisted is the word that best describes the images. Like this one ...
So, I picked up the wrench, dropped it in the floor of the back seat of my car, and carried on with my day. That wrench sat in the back seat of my car for about a year before I actually took it out, and photographed it. Again, I just had one thing in mind, which is described with those three words. Making cool images.
Remembering what Sigur and I did with the film cannisters, I took some thin thread, and attempted to string this wrench up. Originally my intent was to string it in such a way so that I had a fully frontal lit wrench in the foreground, and nothing but blue sky in the background. This didn't work well, though for a couple reasons. The first reason was time. I shot this during my lunch hour, and so I didn't really have a lot of time to be fooling around with it. Also I noticed that stringing this wrench up was going to be harder than it looked.
However, I did manage to string it up in the front yard of my rental house in Liberal. Here is how it turned out with no digital manipulation (other than the removal of the string with the clone stamp tool in Photoshop).
Then I endeavored to make a cool image even cooler, by doing some additional manipulation. This second image was achieved by isolating the wrench from the sidewalk and lawn in the background, and applying a black and white filter. I then used the clone stamp tool to remove the small chunk of concrete inside the turn below the wrench. I then used the liquefy filter to further twist the wrench handle. Have a look...
I thought this looked pretty cool, but I wanted to do something a little different with it. In my original intent, I had the wrench against a blue sky. Well, that didn't work out, but I thought I could put the wrench against a black background as an alternative. So I did that. Also, I have been noticing that when I use the liquefy filter, and twist the imagery, I notice the degradation and/or distortion of the pixels in the area that is twisted. So, to counter this, I decided to use the clone stamp tool in an effort to restore some of that distortion. Here is the result.
All three images have a completely different look and feel, but they all come from the same original image. And, they come from the original intent of Making Cool Images. My favorite dream.
