Experimentation: Copier Fun

Ok... so I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to incorporate this stuff in my final piece - having far too much fun with it to worry about such trivial things! Enjoying just experimenting... had no idea my photocopier would ever prove to be such a worthwhile investment! (Incidentally I tend to just bung most of my images on flickr so use the link on the right hand side of the page to access the rest!)

Research: Copy Art

Last session I had a play on the photocopier with Susan. Using the HDR image I produced last week I utilised various techniques in order to create new images: enlarged small details, scrunched up a copy and rescanned, rotated whilst scanning (which resulted in a skate ramp!) and finally got silly with head shots and hands. Produced some really interesting results - certainly one of the head/hand images would work well if pasted into a confined space (think genie in a bottle type scenario). Tried emailing some of these images directly to Mark but he hasn't forwarded them yet so not sure whether they found their destination or not! Will post them if they turn up (alternatively could always just photograph them) Did a bit of googling on photocopy art and stumbled across a few interesting artists: have posted links and a couple of images below. Really interested in the work of Helen Chadwick (used her body a lot) but was unable to find any really good images online - will try the college library to see if they have any of her books. Also liked Thomas Eisner's Fanciful Designs - could incorporate his technique of placing objects on the glass in order to create elements for my landscape (if you follow the link you can see quite a few of his images where he creates birds etc out of found objects)

Helen Chadwick 'Of Mutability'



Thomas Eisner's Fanciful Designs

bit more info on the history of copy art here (Copy This! A Historical Perspective On the Use of
the Photocopier in Art by John A. Walker)

Experimentation: HDR (I don't have a clue what I'm doing...)

Weather was lovely last weekend so had a wander up the river and took a few snaps. Basically looking for some potential material for the fantasy landscape project. On one of the 'pub-stops' I bumped into a guy who offered me a copy of Photomatix Pro ( seem to be doing well with the freebies!) obviously it would have been churlish to refuse! Picked it up the other day and have had a brief play with it... hence the title 'I don't have a clue what I'm doing' There is a help file but help files are usually rubbish so I don't tend to bother with them... so these are my first attempts!

The first image is as shot and was one of four shot at different exposures. I imported these into Photomatix and the result is image 2. Tried the automate HDR process in CS4 (by means of comparison) and it didn't align the images correctly so gave up... am sure this is me and CS4 is capable of better! Final image I just took a single RAW image and underexposed by one stop, then 2 stops, then one above and then two above. Saved the resulting .jpgs and then imported into Photomatix. This seems a little more subtle. As first attempts I'm quite happy with the results. Certainly potential with this: really liked the stone pillars in the second image and can see how used in a more subtle way it can be quite effective. I still hate the full-on garish HDR effect though... Obviously need to play with this some more!