Analog

Lately it seems - for good or ill - I'm compelled to experiment with my own image. Questioning what it means to have this form. Who or what is this person who appears this way in the camera's eye? Must one be attractive to look at, as I was always told, or is it okay to be ugly, distorted, deformed? 

Most of all, what if a person's inside doesn't match their outside? Can an image capture the nature of person's soul?

It was with this kind of  thing in mind that I was playing around with various photo filters. (Also, not gonna lie, just because they looked kinda cool.) I went through lots of them before I tried the "bad TV" filter as a lark. Bad TV. How cute! How nostalgic! Except I threw it on, and there "I" was. My true nature. It didn't work on everyone...just me.

Intrigued, I tried it on scads of photos. baby pictures, teenage Halloween parties, the grab shot of me on the night of the dreaded stocking incident downtown. The pictures were not more attractive, but they were more true. 

No matter what time of life the photos were taken, the distorted photos seemed more real than the unaltered ones. There is my answer, I suppose. Strange to think that all this time, my soul has really been an analog TV on the blink 

Dream Of The Sentient Woods

One night, I dreamt that the woods were alive. That is, that the woods were sentient beings, twig-like creatures who only assumed their true form under cover of darkness. At night, when everyone else was asleep, I could hear their rustling whispers as they moved. In the dream, I came to understand that the underbrush did not so much grow as creep.

This little twig configuration I saw the other day made me wonder if one of them hadn't been caught in the daylight after all. :)

Magical Touch

A child playing with a light in the darkness. 

Shadow Play

Shadows on the wall in the house of my parents; The 1960's iron trellis was always strangely disappointing to climb. 

Left-Hand Angel

Left-hand angel

So, I was driving through Victoria last week and noticed that the creepy, ever-present angels looming near the cemetery gates seemed a bit different....

Okay, I'm pretty sure the missing head of the right-hand angel was an accident - there is a broken tree nearby and a chip in one wing as well. The burning question remains, however - Where is the head? No, really. Where is it? It was certainly not in evidence nearby. Did someone abscond with it? Do they have it in their bedroom where it stares at them in the night? I mean, those angels always seemed about to turn and look at you, even when they had both their heads....*

 * "Oh, I have an animation program that can make them do that, easy!" said my brother happily, thinking he was being helpful in that special way he has. Erm...no, I prefer not to see my recurring nightmares come to life on screen, but thanks anyway, bro. :p

In A Hotel Room On The Coast

She fades in and out.

The Sky Above...

Spookiness Is Afoot Downtown

Late last night, while taking a walk with the family in this nice cooler weather, I snapped these pics outside the newspaper building . They did not come out as anticipated - to say the least!

One may wonder why take pictures of the newpaper building in the first place. It's not exactly a wonder of great beauty and architechture. Simple answer - the area gives me the creeps. And I haven't called my project "Victoria Phantasmagoria" for nothing. Still, I was unnerved to see what look like playful little shades lurking around the perimeter of the fence on the last pic. Sure, lots of mistakes must have gone into creating this image, but...none of the other photos I took even a few feet away look like this.

It's kind of appropriate that not far from that spot is a bit of graffitti on the sidewalk that says "not here".

(I posted the third photo to my Tumblr last night but wanted to place all three together here)

A Talkative Mime

One of my all-time favorite photos, taken by Roni Gendler at Buda Castle, Budapest.
(from: National Geographic)

Galaxy

Another beautiful photo, courtesy of NASA:


Looking like a spider's web swirled into a spiral, the galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, the faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy's disk.

At a distance of about 10 million light-years, IC 342 is relatively close by galaxy standards, however our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. It belongs to the same group as its even more obscured galactic neighbor, Maffei 2.

IC 342 is nearly face-on to our view, giving a clear, top-down view of the structure of its disk. It has a low surface brightness compared to other spirals, indicating a lower density of stars (seen here as a blue haze). Its dust structures show up much more vividly (yellow-green). Blue dots are stars closer to us, in our own Milky Way.

New stars are forming in the disk at a healthy clip. Glowing like gems trapped in the web, regions of heavy star formation appear as yellow-red dots due to the glow of warm dust. The very center glows especially brightly in the infrared, highlighting an enormous burst of star formation occurring in this tiny region. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel this central star formation.

Data from Spitzer's infrared array camera (IRAC) are shown in blue (3.6 and 4.5 microns) and green (5.8 and 8.0 microns), while the multiband imaging photometer (MIPS) observation is red (24 microns).

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech