Tuesday, 8th March, 2005

Inconsequential Outcomes [Flickr]

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

This morning, the sun was shining quite brilliantly. I noticed, that over on the wall opposite our bed, it was coming through the window and making a rather pretty pattern — mostly out of focus, overlapped rectangles. After a while two stronger bands appeared, and Kath and I were both amazed by how quickly they grew. In the space of about 5 minutes, they'd gone from two little blobs to these two bands of light.

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Beautiful, isn't it? What struck me, was that we were watching the end result of a hugely complicated system of spinning planets and gravity-induced orbits. The distant nuclear reaction of a star, and the resulting emitted light, transformed by the rotation of a body in space into the slow creep of two rectangles on my bedroom wall. That doesn't do justice to it. It was like this simple little thing — two shapes moving quite slowly — was the product of some massive interconnected system of stuff. And we were very privilaged to be watching the outcome. ... Ack, I'll stop trying to be all melodramatic. I'll just upload a picture of George being cute in a bag instead ...

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Wow — that sounds really cool Mike I love the concept of chance moments and positions of things creating stunning imagery. It's an extension, perhaps, of the idea of the Found Object — but recorded differently.

Years ago, during a physics lesson, our teacher interrupted his flow to get each of us up in turn to stand where he was standing and see the refraction of light through a drop of water that was hanging off on of the taps in the classroom. Most of us thought he was insane, but I can still remember how beautiful the rainbow was.

Against my own advice

I've been playing around today I just thought I'd try something different for a change...

   

As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the reasons why my work ended up being vertical stripes was in response to the inherent 'pixelness' of digital photography. Armed with a little 2 megapixel Canon iXus, it's quite hard to take shots that will blow up well — and so, I decided to go completely the other way and make the work about the pixels themselves.

WIth that in mind though, now that my EOS 300D has a resolution that is pretty good I've been thinking of doing stuff that doesn't always have to be straight.

(like me, a little )

One thing I used to do years ago, was play around with filters in Photoshop. I'm slightly shuddering as I admit that, for reasons I'll come back to, but I rekindled the practice earlier.

I quite like these — there's a similar chromatic aesthetic to my regular stripe work in them, but I need to develop the theme a lot more before they get somewhere. If at all.

...

The reason I shudder when I talk about Photoshop filters, by the way, is, as I tell my students over and over again, that they're often used to compensate for a lack of interest in an original.

The other reason is that time after time, you see the same old shit coming out of people's experiments with Adobe's finest. And it strikes me that half the time, it's not the artist making the work, but Photoshop itself.

We have a little saying where I work: "It appears Photoshop is going to get a First this year"

What happened to Kai? I remember pictures of a Scandinavian bloke with big bushy blonde hair. Or did I dream that?

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Just one more 'playing-around' image. I really need to think more about where these could (should?) go.

That one, funnily enough, started out as the picture at the top of the page, of the sunlight on the wall. You can just about make out the two streaks in the centre part of it

...

That thing with Kai's Power Tools — I've seen it happen quite a few times. Remember what happened to graphic design just after (a) someone invented drop shadows, and (b) the titles to the movie Se7en?

(Which actually, (b) that is, I'm guilty of as well. Witness my grunge-tastic-Kyle Cooper-influenced header )

Alli,

Are you serious about the synesthesia thing and Tuesday being yellow?

Yep — although not as serious as some people who smell things when they hear words. I just find that certain words or ideas or places have colours associated with them, which is kinda the basis to all the work I've been doing recently.

Friday, incidently, is green.

Lisa,

Drop shadows on titles have been around a long time

Sorry, I should have been more specific — there was a flury of drop shadows about 6 or 7 years ago when a plugin became available for Photoshop. Soon everyone was using them, in print and all over the web. They became almost ubiquitous with design. Interestingly, it's only now that they're filtering their way into CSS — and I think I'm write in saying that only Safari at present supports the drop-shadow CSS specification

Susan,

What's your opinion on Paint Shop Pro versus Photoshop

I haven't a clue — I've never used PSP. I was having an interesting conversation with someone at work a week or so ago, about how most programmes follow the 'Photoshop Model' when it comes to how they work. We were discussing how once you've got your head round Photoshop, there are very few bits of software (design-wise that is) that don't work the same.

what do you think is the best application for producing publish-ready illustrations (mostly diagrams)

Adobe Illustrator. Without a doubt. I would have at one time said Freehand maybe, but nowadays, I wouldn't touch it.

It's Photoshop with lines instead of pixels.

Which illustrates (if you'll excuse the pun) my point about everything working on the Photoshop model

reminds me of the "ransome note" stye of stuff

looks up at header.gif

backs away sheepishly

...

I think the problem, from my point of view anyway, with Freehand Miss K, was that after the Aldus/Adobe battles (which Freehand used to lead Illustrator by a mile — Adobe were always playing catch-up it seemed), and once Macromedia got their hands on it, they tried to position it as part of their web-suite, and it doesn't really fit in there.

It used to be, without doubt, the best and easiest way to create vector graphics, but it got lost in a sea of over-blown features.

The minute Illustrator started acting stabily (and, for me, the minute it started faithfully opening EPSs and PDFs without any complaining) that was the moment I had to switch.

I found it really useful for opening up clients' EPS files and finding whatever it was that was crashing our imagesetter — usually a null text character.

Final Cut Pro, for me, was the obvious choice after the whole Premier 4.? malarky (my version numbers might be off there). THere was a time when you had to have the right revision to go with your machine — B for one set, and C for another. It was far too confusing. PLus I couldn't get it to work seamlessly with my miroMotion capture card — and when I got FInal Cut, it all just worked perfectly.

Now, of course, it's just so easy to use FCP to do things, I wonder why people bother at all with Premier.

...

I think one of the issues I've got with PSP, is (and I must plead ignorance here — I'm talking about a long time ago) was the utter crap I've seen come out of it. The one time I used it, I found it clunky. Similar to the GIMP — powerful, but designed by programmers, not photographers.

Getting software to do cool things, is not the point of image editing — the point is to make beautiful images, and sometimes programmers get in the way.

I'll save my little diatribe on that for another day...