In this exercise, I'm going to start with one picture, then go down a number of different paths to see what sort of variations I can produce. The starting point is a picture taken in the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Here's the starting point. It was shot in infrared because it was dark in this gallery.
Here, I've made it black and white and bumped the contrast.
The first step is to try to jazz things up a little, while still staying with the original image.
Sepia toning? Yuck!
Much better. Here I've broken the image into shaded blocks with highlights along some of the edges. I call this "Patternism." With this technique, the image is broken down into some sort of pattern. You can see the original image if you step back until you're at least 10 or 15 feet from the monitor. It's amazing how much of the original image you can see if viewed this way.
Adding a glow.
In this variation, the blocks that form the image seem to have an inner glow. This one is a keeper.
A hybrid image
In this variation, several of the earlier images are combined to produced this hybrid. It's an interesting effect, but perhaps a little too cute.
This is a completely new path. Here the image is rendered into a network of stars of different colors. A different rendering of the Patternism technique. And yet, if you step a ways back, it's amazing how much of the original image you can now see.
Copyright 1958-2017 Tony & Marilyn Karp