water is my eye; most faithful mirror.

... the lady and the glass.

(trivia: the title here is a lyric from the song, "Teardrop," originally performed by Massive Attack and sung by guest vocalist Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. the song became the theme music for the tv show House, and was subsequently covered by several other artists including Jose Gonzales and Newton Faulkner.)

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our daily challenge: mirror image

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the geek behind the curtain: all shots and layers in this photo art assemblage were taken and developed by myself with a hand-held, point-and-shoot camera and the free (open source) graphics manipulation program called GIMP, and a trial version of DAP.

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very sorry that things got befuddled on wednesday night and that i didn't get around to posting a challenge in the ODC group. i had actually spent the spare moments of my day jotting notes in my sketchpad for the challenge, had it sitting next to me on the table near the laptop that evening as i waited for 8pm EST when i could post it -- and then Kitchuu came home from her shift at the hospital and i lost track of everything. still, it ended up being quite fortuitious because i LOVE this "mirror image" challenge. thanks for saving me again, Yvonne! =)

instead of doing a literal "mirror image" with a physical mirror, i've pushed the boundaries what what the term means. in the way that an actor portraying the life of a historical person in a film is a kind of loose theatrical "mirror image," this photo art i've made of little E ended up being a mirror image of some art we saw on the wall at the museum recently.

there are 3 photos here, all taken within the same hour at a local university museum. the shot of little E with the magnifying glass is almost "as is" (or "as was") at least in terms of how powerfully the glass magnified her eye -- i didn't mess with that. behind little E on the wall is a second photo i wasn't supposed to take (sorry!) of the work of Maggie Taylor, who is a local gainesville flatbed-scanner artist of the highest quality and ingenuity. her image is of at least in part a probably victorian-era woman holding a magnifying lens before her own eye. then i copied that image and flipped it, and put it inside the "negative space" of little E's magnifying lens.

(Maggie's amazing work can be seen at: maggietaylor.com/ )

next i added a frame, which is the third shot here, so that both little E and the art of the woman in the background would become "hanging art." this frame normally holds a minor Monet painting -- and which is in a part of the museum where i was allowed to take pictures. the wall behind the frame, however, was rather dull, though i loved the shadow cast from it. so as a last step i took the entire flattened image i'd made into DAP, set the controls for "Wax crayons," which is a setting i'd never used before, pumped up sliders, and let the program run for about 30 seconds before stopping it (it didn't even get to the second phase of its 3-phase process). then i took the resulting crayon-styled color scratches and brought them back into GIMP and blended the dull wall with the textures from the DAP'ed image, cutting away the center portion so the mirror images of little E and the lady with the glass would be clean and clear.

Taken on: September 12, 2013

Tags:

ODC

mirror image

powershot

SX30

photo art

GIMP

DAP

photomanipulation

maggie smith

teardrop

lady and the glass

magnify

magnifying lens

mirror

life imitating art

art imitating life

ouroboros

photomaginarium

digital-age recession-era folk art « less

Sets appears in: • little E • mindfeather redux more » • hands & eyes « less

Groups appears in: • Our Daily Challenge

Camera: Canon PowerShot SX30 IS, f/2.7, 1/10 sec, 4.3mm, ISO 200 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon PowerShot SX30 IS
Aperture:	f/2.7
Exposure Time:	0.1 sec (1/10)
Focal Length:	4.3mm
ISO:	200
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Scene Capture Type:	Landscape
Color Space:	sRGB
Show full info

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