Photo Restoration: New medium meets old medium

So I realized the other day that I could use Photoshop could restore old family photos. Over time, photos can get damaged, with creases, scratches and dust. Fortunately, photoshop can be used to remove these blemishes to digitally restore the photo to its former glory. So I've been working on touching up photos of my ancestors. Below is a photo of my great-grandmother as a child, taken in the late 1870s to early 1880s. Since this was a tin type photo, captured with a digital camera and editing in Photoshop, this is great example of an old medium intersecting with a new medium.

The retouching isn't perfect. There are still plenty flaws in it. However, such fixes are beyond my skill in Photoshop and, given how old and damaged this photo is, possibly beyond what it is possible while still preserving the original photo.

Photomontage: Twenty-Two Thousand

This is a time-lapse photomontage of aerial photos of West Pasco, WA. The photos were obtained by making screen captures of satellite views of the area in Google Earth, with the older photos obtained using the Historical Imagery tool. The photos were taken with the center on GPS coordinates 46º15’53.35”N 119º11’44.34”W, and viewed from an elevation of 22,482 feet (hence the name of the piece). Satellite views were used from a period ranging from 1996 (the oldest available) to 2013 (the most recent).

I created this time-lapse because I wanted to show the development of the Tri-Cities, WA over time. Because a photo taken in 1996 was the oldest available, I wanted to choose a portion of the Tri-Cities that has had a significant amount of change and knew that a lot of housing construction is going in West Pasco right now, so I chose to focus my “photography” there. Taking small sections of the twenty aerial views available, I pieced them together into a montage that formed a map of the growth. Excluding portions of the maps to eliminate control features and other marks on the images that were artifacts that resulted from taking screen captures from Google Earth left an irregular border to the montage, which I accentuated with the placement of sections to create a patchy design.  To balance the whitespace around the image, I left some sections of whitespace near the center of the image. I also added a small section of whitespace near the lower left corner to balance out the heavily dark portion of the image created by the Columbia River.

This was actually the second attempt I made of a photomontage of this area. Here is first one, which used the 1996 view as a background, with sections of the most recent view, along with a few sections from the period in between to show the development of a few areas.

Emphasis Through Contrast in Color

As noted in Mary Stewart's Launching the Imagination, contrasting color can create emphasis, with the dominant color becoming the standard, and other colors becoming the exception (86). I learned this while working on a timelapse photomontage project. I use aerial photos of a particular area over 18 years of urban development. The oldest photo provides a kind of background because it is in black and white, with patches of more recent photos being in color (this was not an aesthetic choice--this was how the aerial photos were taken). In the original photos, however, there was insufficient contrast. The color photos had a sufficient amount of gray that it was difficult to distinguish between black and white vs color, therefore making it difficult to distinguish older from more recent. I ended up darkening the black and white portions and lightening the color portions. to make greater contrast between the two.

Face-Swapping Mirror

Digital artist Kyle McDonald has a new project (Wired.com is a great source for new media art, I'm discovering!) involving two mirrors place in different galleries. Each is a digital mirror, scans your facial expression and the tilt of your head, and replaces it with a picture of someone else with the same expression and posture from a database of pictures of people that have stood in front of the mirrors. It's an attempt to bring to real life the thought that someone, somewhere is making the same expression as you right then. And if I'm understanding correctly, the two digital mirrors share the database, so there's a strong chance you'll be seeing the face of someone that stood in front of the other.
The kicker in all this is where the two mirrors are placed: one is in Japan, the other Korea.
As the video below points out, these two countries have had a complicated relationship with each other. Perhaps this project is an attempt to help the populations of the two countries feel a little closer together.

[Bill Nye Voice] QUILTS! OF SCIENCE!

"Artists and scientists are not that different," artist Anna Von Mertens says, "We're in our own little worlds grinding away at ideas." The field of new media art would definitely agree with Anna, which doesn't separate artist from scientist. According to Professor Doug Gast at Washington State University, Tri-Cities, one of the roles of the new media artist is to invent new ways to visualize data and make the results public. Anna has done so with her quilts, incorporating scientific phenomena into them, such as a nuclear detonation:

The black quilt shows a side-view of a nuclear bomb blast, while the white view shows a top view. The article linked above describes her process:

She designs her first patterns on the computer, sometimes drafting them from scratch. Once that’s complete, she uses a projector to draw the pattern onto the fabric. “I transfer each line by hand, with chalk. I chalk out my stitch pattern onto the piece. If the piece happens to include color, I hand dye it too,” she said.

Other quilts have included the starfield during significant historical events (such as September 11, 2001), ocean currents, the Aurora Borealis, and tree rings.

Color Methods

Just a little thought here. I found it interesting while doing the reading this week that the primary colors of the subtractive color system are secondary colors of the additive color system. And also interesting that this isn't the case in reverse. I don't know if there's a reason for this, or if there's a historical explanation to this. It's just something that caught my attention.

Waterlogged

According to a recent Wired.com article, photographer Matthew Brandt has a recent project soon to be released as book of photos created with an interesting approach. He took pictures of lakes and then, after the photos are printed, he soaks them for days to weeks in water that came from the lake in the picture, causing the inks in the print to degrade. The results can be quite impressive, such as this photo that looks like it's on fire:

Photography is old media, but these have a novel production process, so they might be considered new media. Either way, I think it looks pretty awesome.

Flocks of Photoshopping

So recent article in Wired.com Shaun Kardinal has released a recent project that I think is pretty cool. He's photoshopped flocks birds into patterns that, while unnatural, as amazing looking. The patterns include a spiral, triangles, a square, as well as this circle:



This is new media art in a couple different ways. In addition to being photoshopped, the opening of this piece wasn't a typical art opening, but rather a digital opening on Instagram. He released a photo every ten minutes on June 5 between 6 and 8 p.m.

Illusion of Space

In Mary Stewart's "Launching the Imagination", during the discussion of texture of space, Douglas Smith's No Turning shows how texture and linear perspective are combined to produce an illusion of space, showing a view looking down on a truck in an alleyway in which the truck is trapped. The effect is generated by having the bricks diminish in size in the image as the distance increased (p. 25). I love when this effect is used, and have seen it used to impressive effect. In Salt Lake City, Utah LDS Temple, this same illusion was used to make the building appear taller when viewed from the ground. Because we expect to see smaller detail as something gets farther away, the various levels of the 222-foot building's exterior were made with finer detail the higher up the building you go to make the building appear taller than it actually is.

Self-Portrait

A self-portrait of myself with backdrop images representative of the genres of fiction that I enjoy writing, as well as being images from works of which I am a fan. On the left is Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings, representing the fantasy genre. On the right is the titular city from Stargate: Atlantis, representing the science fiction genre. The text is an original statement from me,