Order of H'Pak

I'm putting together a new image and I'm at a point where I'm just sitting here looking at it thinking, hmm, now what?. It's obviously a bright and cheery image (right?), so maybe I could stick in a nice picture of a flower. NOT. But what else? What's it make you think of?

What I do plan to do is put a figure in. The figure will be interacting with the hole somehow, i.e. kneeling before it, sitting beside it, something like that. So that is probably coming. Any ideas on that?

The sky/red glow...no real ideas yet on that. I was going to add some kind of sky, but without a good idea so far I've left it black--and just to keep it from being too stark while I work on it I put in the red glow, which also adds to an ominous/heavy feeling that the image has for me anyway. I might either use a nighttime star shot I already have or do a new one for it--thinking star trails or something as in Lava Tube Borealis , a straight photo (not digital) that I made in 1990. But I don't know yet what will go into the background.


Plumbing the Depths

Below are the images I've used so far to make Plumbing the Depths, a working title that may or may not change, don't know.

These are the four photos I used for the basis of the image. That's the tip of the North Jetty of Humboldt Bay, California. The photos were normal exposures, but here they're darkened for the image I'm working on.


These are faces I put together from various crowd shots I took at Reggae on the River last year, 2005.

Thanks in advance for any input

Just curious - no idea if this is good or not but could the figure sorta be being sucked inside? (See the opening scene of Jumanji for the kind of thing I mean).

Thanks for the comment, Elf . I like the idea and thought about it, but this is what I've gotten so far.

Here's what I've done so far:

Plumbing the Depths (in progress)

That sky is a shot of the North Star I took a couple years ago. I still don't know what to do w/ the sky for sure...I like the figure tho.

Frum - first off let the record show that I can't tell my head from my @$$ when it comes to things artistic. and secondly let me just say that having seen your images you created withOUT any input from me I would hate to jinx a really good thing...

But since you asked, and now that I've burned those bridges in front of me...

I like the basic look of the image so far, the mountains and ground textures look good - and I thought the middle orb looked odd in the first iteration, but now with the figure bent in front of it the well is starting to mesh together with the rest of the image. (or is that 'gel together'?) the connection(?) of the images in the orb/well and the person at the edge of the well works uh 'well'.

I agree about the sky - it needs _something_, not sure what. If you effect the hell out of it, the blurry starscape you have might work - but in rough present form it looks well, rough. I do like that the star(s) in motion bring to mind the element of passing time - as if the person kneeling in front of that well has been kneeling there for several hours/days/millenia. Not sure if there are other ways to convey that or even if that's what you *want* to convey, but it gives an interesting feel to it.

ok. I am done. Carry on.

Good image Frum. The only thing that bothers me is, like Fresh said, the perspective on the well. It just looks a little off somehow.

What's the shadow on the left side of the pic 'frum'?

Thanks for the comments, guys

The shape of the well's opening is a puzzler. It is foreshortened to account for perspective, though maybe not quite enough. And it's also warped (pulled toward the corner a bit) because that's what a circle would do when viewed through a wide-angle lens at this angle. But it's not exactly what you'd notice if you were actually there because we mentally account for that kind of distortion from our eyes' lenses.

To experiment I photographed the lid to a salsa container on the kitchen table, viewing it from as near to the apparent angle of view that I have in this image, to find out the proper shape it should be for the image. The result is: I dunno. For one thing, the apparent angle in the image is really made up of those four photos (see above post), the two top ones of which were from one angle, while for the two bottom ones I aimed the camera at a more downward angle right at the cement. The result is there is no single perspective in the image, just sort of an implied one.

Another image with two distinct perspectives is Safe Harbor . In that one the ocean was shot from pretty far above on a cliff, while the water from the waterfall was shot from its level. It's one of the reasons the image has an unreal feal; the perspective is totally whacked! If it were a real scene, the ocean would be more at our eye level, while the water after falling over the waterfall would be farther below us. Totally backwards in the image . I love it!

I like to be able to do some reality bending with my images. When it looks pretty real, yet makes the viewer uncomfortable thinking of it as reality, then I get some weird satisfaction. Reality that never was. To quote my website (to quote myself, that is!), my art is "a collection of images I made along my journeys through thought and fancy, dreams and subconscious passages. Pictures I took out the window. Postcards from the imagination. A slide show of the mindscape."

[Said in my best Rod Serling voice] Come with me if you will, to visit "a collection of images along journeys through thought and fancy, dreams and subconscious passages. Pictures taken out the window. Postcards from the imagination. A slide show of the mindscape." welcome to the Frumious Zone....

LOL, I love Twilight Zone! Thanks

Oh, the shadow from the someone/something off camera is from one of those cement things you see along the edges, but I carved the shadow into that of a mysterious, dare I say,"shadowy," figure--a mystery entity, perhaps the same one that appears in the eye in the image I use for my avatar here, Eye of the Beholder (Enemy Within). If you do a Yahoo image search for Eye that image is on the second page at the moment! It seems to be getting further down the page...hmm. It's the most frequently viewed image on my site.

Oh, I used myself for the kneeling, reaching figure.

Thank you guys for giving me a sounding board and forum for critique. What I miss most from my college days are the critiques. It's so great to get input from others, to see and understand how the images I create are perceived by others. It's a visual language and to use it I have to understand what I'm saying.

Frum, finally giving you some feedback, been one of those weeks.

Great image, very evocative!

Love the imagery, one minute I'm thinking apocolyse, the other some alien world. The portal promted the question: is it looking INTO some hellish place or looking OUT of a hellish place? Are the faces of the lost or the free? Or just memories of people long gone? My mind went several ways on that, I like the ambiguity.

Hmmm. just a thought, what if the person is kneeling face to us, looking down, face not totally visable. The person sees a reflection that maybe looks like them - but it is a reflection? another person? the same person? Maybe the figure is reaching out with their hand, to see if the reflection follows or not...

Frum - you really do cool stuff btw!