I promised myself I would complete a portfolio of images documenting my perceptions after the detached retina. There were a good number attempts to do this with my G11 camera in the first months after the surgery. I never got around to working on very many of them.
These photos are the weeping crabapple tree, ‘Molten Lava’ just outside my office door. (Click on the photo to see a larger view.) As I walk out of the office and look into the lower garden, past the variegated Rhamnus and toward the autumnal orange foliage of Cotinus ‘Grace’, the red fruit of the crabapple move in relation to the shapes beyond. My hyper acute perception that I don’t have depth perception makes me see these red balls of fruit as if they were a cel film overlay in an animation studio.
What fun really to see the shapes line up and become a tapestry ! Planes of perception, sliding back and forth as I move in mere inches this way and that. The ability to crop exquisitely in post production, to peek through just enough of the spikey Phormium in the foreground, after cropping out some empty space in the lower right, gives a final composition that fills the frame with a fine balance of shape, texture, and color.
Here is how it looked originally before I worked on it.
I adjusted the color, cropped, removed the stake holding up the young tree, and used a Topaz Simplify filter, BuzSim (adjusted) to create a rich, nearly surreal rendition to match my mood.
In another view of the same scene I used a PhotoShop filter, ‘Palette Knife’ to render the effect. (click photo for larger view)
Note in this version I kept the stake that supports the tree but removed the Phormium leaf. So many small aesthetic decisions need to be made that can make a huge difference to the balance and composition of the final photo. Who knows I may change them again. So much to learn …
More images to come. Here is a link to a previous post and photos I took of the Cotinus ‘Grace’ shrub seen in the background, all taken in those same few days, November 2010, after the second surgery.
