12-01-10 – The Song Remains the Same

did not include the lion exhibit for my chance at ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’

best flash animation of that song you will ever see.

Yep. I’m pretty sure you’re right. That was great! I even recognized everyone, which is pretty good considering how often I frequent all things fark but not tography.

Anywho, I mentioned some beez.

Well, a b.

That’s Blerticus, impromptu lion stand-in. There’s several versions, I played with the lighting quite a bit to see how it changed the composition. I did the same with my ‘Crying’ shot.

Which, BTW, is doing okay, but I’d like to hear opinions and critiques on the shot, as I haven’t delved much into close up portraiture type shots. It’s hard to get willing vict–err, subjects; seems I’m the only one.

I am guessing the original shot was done with a large format bellows because there is no place on the street to shoot the album cover shot with anything else.

So are you saying that that’s actually the building used for the original album cover? If so, that makes it even cooler!

It could have been done with a tilt/shift lens (first ones came out in the 60s, but I don’t know how wide they were), but it’s far more likely to have been large format with bellows. The perspective is completely distortion-free.

The other way to do it is to use a really wide angle lens and shoot parallel to the building and crop out all the wasted foreground (but I agree, a view camera is the most likely thing).

St. Marks is a narrow street to begin with, and the sidewalk is also quite narrow. As it was, I was in someone’s garbage, hunkered against the wall. While I was shooting this shot, (and some of you saw this on my FB) this 20 something asked me why I was being so diligent in shooting the building, and I replied it was a piece of Rock and Roll history, you know, Physical Grafitti. He looked at the building for a second and said “There isn’t any grafitti on the building”. I just walked away.

From the contest fark thread:

BecauseISaidSo If 6 Was 9
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, from the album Axis: Bold As Love
(Fractal image projected onto the back of an artwork transparency mask then photographed)

I could learn from you.

/also facepalm because I forgot I have photos laying around from Abbey Road.

I could learn from you.

Wow, that’s flattering coming from you, but I seriously doubt it. It’s basically the same technique you used for your Kodachrome shot (which came out really well, BTW) and that U-Man used for his psychedelic plastic fork shot back in Forktography.

The only real trick was creating the artwork transparency. I used MS Expression Design, but Illustrator or any other vector graphics app would also work. From there, I laser printed it onto some transparency film I’ve had lying around for 10+ years from when I had to teach a class in a room that still used an overhead projector. I had to run it through twice to get it dark enough and fortunately my old printer had good enough registration that I didn’t get an offset image.

Check out my bees for alternate backgrounds. I almost went with the purple one so I could use the “with a taste of Purple Haze” byline.

Having said all that, if you do have any questions about it, ask away.

My original idea with this one was to have a completely transparent six, shine a light thru it and then reflect it off a couple of mirrors to invert it horizontally and vertically so that it turned into a 9, but I couldn’t get that to come out decently.

I’ve been toying on paper with ideas for alpha-masking dual exposures, spawned by my idea for the kodachrome shot.

The first idea ends with white negative space, where the monitor is cranked up to pure white, max bright and a black mask in the desired shape. Followed by using my cokin filter frame to use positive/negative vignettes, but couldn’t rack an idea for black negative space until I saw your shot.

Apparently the subtle nuances of Cannibal Corpse are lost on the average Fark voter…