Images for 10-11-06

I forgot to upload images for today! For my photo blog. (If a picture is worth 1000 words, how many gigabytes is a photo blog worth?) Ok that wasn't funny especially.

I was writing a bit about patterns in nature and architecture. Silhouettes of human-made things against the sky is one of the simplest examples of this, if you want to see it that way. Here are two "powerlines" shots. Parallel lines against the sky -- simple yet pleasing to the eye, kind of, sort of, maybe, no?





And another example of intersecting patterns is George Rickey's sculpture at the Empire State Plaza, "Two Lines Oblique", against one of the four similar State office buildings, at night. It's a bit pixelated/grainy, thanks to my Kodak Easyshare, though I've adjusted the shadow/highlight, hue/saturation (slightly), and, most importantly, the contrast/brightness. This set of adjustments has become standard for me since using photoshop.



There are apparently other instances of this Two Lines Oblique sculpture by Rickey throughout the country, such as at the University of Kentucky Art Museum as seen in this link: http://www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum/luce/Top50/50/pages/Rickey_jpg.htm. Theirs looks smaller.

Using the contrast and brightness adjustment in photoshop is very similar to what one does in the darkroom, though obviously it's much easier. I don't really have pretensions of creating something "genuine" or "authentic" like a film purist -- I mean, I do, but I don't put much stock in it. As a mild proponent of Oscar Wilde's ideas of Art and the role of the Artist, I could hardly object to the manipulation of the image by any means whatsoever. I imagine the author of "The Decay of Lying" would approve of the power of Photoshop to "alter reality." Indeed, he argues that life and nature imitate art rather than the other way around. The artist is the creator of truth. "Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be completely relied upon." (Some would argue this last point.) Of course, aesthetic truth is all that matters to Wilde, and I really think his position is more than just sophistry, wit, and intelligent fluff. "The arts are the beginning and the end of [the hu-]man, of civilization as we know it." Someone said that once, I'll bet, and if they didn't, well, I just did...