Title: "Subtraction IV"
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I have been following the photography of Chris Friel on Flickr and on his website. I find his images fascinating, most of them made using slow shutter speeds and a tilt shift lens. I have contemplated getting a tilt shift lens for my dslr, but the truth is that I'm awash in camera equipment and don't really need to add such an expensive lens at this time. But recently Friel posted a few images on Flickr from his travels that were taken with a compact digital camera without a tilt shift lens, that had a similar haunting feel. So I decided to try this out, but not being patient enough to wait for dusk, I took a walk in the woods around my workplace one day and tried the night mode on my little Canon point and shoot camera. Well, even in the dimmest light I could find, the images taken at 1 second were quite overexposed. Yet I found when I correct the overexposure as much as I could in Lightroom, the images had a quality similar to pencil or charcoal drawings that have been partially erased. The most outrageous "erasure drawing" ever made was Robert Rauschenberg's erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing, but it is an interesting technique to apply to parts of a drawing.
Today's image is the fourth "subtraction" photograph I've made, taken today in those same woods out at work. What I'm producing is nothing like the images Friel makes, although our starting points are fairly similar, and that's something I like about this process - taking inspiration from another artist but going off in my own direction. I want to print a couple of these subtraction images big on regular drawing paper, and also use them as the starting point to do some drawing.
1 comment:
An intriguing abstract world, full of depth. Thanks for explaining your process and for the link to Chris Friel's work. And what a wonderful idea to use these as a starting point for drawing - I'm curious about where that will go.
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