Photoblog 2.0

Weaving, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I was taking care of Katie Rose one morning while Phyllis got the boys to school. Sitting up in Katie’s little nursery I gave her a bottle and looked out through the ragged screen window. It seemed to me that there were two very different planes: the mesh on the screen, and the trees behind.

Putting Katie in her basinette, I brought up my tripod and camera. At first she was excited, thinking the gear was a new toy for her to play with; soon she became subdued when she saw I wasn’t paying much attention to her.

I did two shots, each with maximum depth-of-field, one focused on the trees and one on the mesh. I combined the two versions in Photoshop with a layer mask and gradient blend. The combination didn’t quite go far enough because the trees weren’t that distinct. So I added a third layer of detail from the winter forest on the Yosemite Valley floor. All along, my vision was in monochrome, so as a last step I did the conversion to black and white.

The idea here involves creating an illusion about visual planes. The structure is a little like Magritte’s The Key of the Fields. Are the trees in front, behind, or on the woven mesh? Can they be all of these at the same time?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 7:40 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.