murray hall, snow, and a red and white umbrella
Despite today's class discussion, this is not a digitally altered photograph... apart from the fact that I tweaked the white/dark levels in Photoshop, and - following our discussion about the difference a frame makes - cropped it in way that emphasizes the artificiality of the shape
that is, this isn't a conventional straight-out-of-the-box photo shape.
The original, as you can see, just has more snow, more trees ... and it's much harder (unless you click on it, and make it much larger) to see the umbrella. So it's a case of the format being chosen to suit the (web) medium.
What's more to the point is that this is exactly the kind of image that, to be at all interesting, might have called for a little digital intervention - even cut-and-pasting in a bit of color - someone carrying a bright umbrella, say - or coloring brightly a very dead silver grey helium balloon that's been wedged up in one of the trees for weeks now. I'd taken a couple of o.k. but relatively boring shots that didn't do much more than assert how pretty CAC can look in fresh snow - and then, most fortuitously, this person walked across with an umbrella. I just wish that I had some of Sandy Skoglund's radioactive cats to scatter around the foreground.
Skoglund's cats would certainly make this photo really pop out at the viewer, but I think the red umbrella will suffice. You wouldn't want to lose that spot of colour in a sea of neon green. It's interesting because as a thumbnail, that photo could almost pass for a black-and-white image, but then you notice the red umbrella (although, on the projector we have in Murray, it might actually look completely black-and-white -- red umbrella or not).
ReplyDeletehmmm - the umbrella might at least manage to turn a pale yellow when filtered through that depressingly unreliable machine...
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