A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

As you might have noticed contests do motivate my creativity. This time it was the annual contest of Tenimages.org that seemed interesting, even though I got into it quite late and was very stressed out because of my planned trip to Japan. I was actually leaving the country on the deadline for submissions! In spite of this I managed to submit an entry, though sadly it did not even make it to the 142 finalist posters, but I’m happy anyway :) It was fun to participate!

The theme this year was: labels

A label is any kind of tag attached to something so as to identify the object or its content. Labeling means naming. It is human instinct to group things with what they are most similar and name them as a whole. We live in a world filled with labels antagonising each other to win our preference. There are labels associated with consumer products and fashion. People voluntarily label themselves in order to have a sense of belonging to a group, but there also labels that people use to categorize others stemming from feelings of racism and xenophobia, political and religious discrimination, etc. What is the role of these labels in your life? How can a label describe the world you live in? Can a label give the infinite set of experiences, beliefs and desires that summarise each human being?

I had a number of ideas, but with my limited time and brains I only managed to realize one of them.

Recursive Labeling

re·cur·sive
–adjective
pertaining to or using a rule or procedure that can be applied repeatedly.

la·bel·ing
–verb (used with object)
to affix a label to; mark with a label.

As you can see I had created labels in different sizes and tied them together as a chain of labels that labeled each other… it’s a bit abstract, I guess. The picture with the black background also looks a bit dark, but I guess that depends on it being next to the other picture.

The process was quite straight forward. I printed a bunch of labels in relative sizes, cut those out and used them as templates to cut the actual labels out from table placement cards I had bought at the book store. Then after deciding in what order I should put the different colors I made string holes that were supposed to fit the scale of the different label sizes. Lastly I glued the labels which I had grouped together to create the final labels and then I just tied them together with pieces of string!

The harder part was to get them to look good in a photo. I messed around with many flash configurations, mainly because I’m a newbie strobist with little experience, but after two sessions I had to be satisfied because I really had no more time. The pictures themselves had to have a high resolution so they are both made from three pictures each stitched together as panoramas.

Again, the entries did not fare well in the contest, but perhaps next time! If you find a creative contest you figure I should participate in, send me a message! That was how I ended up creating something for this contest! :o

It appears I am following a theme with my Christmas cards. This year I picked some suitable pictures from Pixar’s latest movie Up, again supplied by /Film, and I did a similar job as last year. The final picture is actually my second montage this time around. I made the first montage with photos taken in my apartment. I was not satisfied with the end result so I swapped the background and started over the next day, then outside.

On december 13th, a Sunday, I went to my parents place and placed my DSLR on a tripod on the roof of their garage and had my younger brother trigger it via an RF-remote. It was chilly outside, around 0°C, though the days after the temperature went down to -8°C so I was lucky to get it done the day I did!

After thawing my hands and looking through the pictures to ensure I would have something usable I went home and started working on fitting myself into Up. First I extracted myself from reality and put myself in the background. I decided my hand would not fit so I extracted one from another photo and transplanted that onto my arm. I adjusted colors and sharpness, added shadows and clouds and finally the text. I also decided to add some glow to make the image seem more genuine, to soften up the edges between me and the background.

The editing was actually spread out over two days, Monday and Tuesday, this because working full time sadly leaves me with little time to spare for my creative activities. The Swedish mailing service had the 16th of December as their deadline for mail that should be delivered before Christmas Eve. This had me frantically print the cards and write a personal message on each after work that day. Then I ran off to the store to buy stamps and drop them into the red Christmas mailbox, they had not emptied it yet so I was in luck! I actually got to send some of the cards the day after as I had not gotten my hands on all the addresses on time, but they also made it in time, interestingly.

Ever since I stumbled upon anamorphosis I have wanted to make one for myself, to decorate my home with, and especially something that would spook visitors. This specific idea formed in my head about six months ago, but it was not until recently that I got to realizing it.

To keep this simple I will not try to retell my entire thought process, as it spans over months and months, but instead what I ended up doing and why.

Planning

I made up my mind to put the anamorphosis in my bathroom, so it would be visible when sitting on the toilet. This because the picture only looks correct from one specific viewing angle, and as I have such a small bathroom you have to sit down no matter what you need to do.

The print would go on the wall next to the seat, opposite the door. Because I wanted the picture to be highly distorted face on, which almost is the whole point, I wanted the real observation point to be almost from the side. This meant putting it on the wall would be perfect. To make things even more interesting, you actually look at the wall through the mirror above the sink.

With the help of masking tape I quickly deducted that the image could be 67×67 centimeters and still fit into view. I made it perfectly square for easy editing later on.

The motif would be myself visible through a window in the wall holding a camcorder, as to make the experience not only wondrous, but also a bit traumatic. This picture would also look like it was an actual hole in the wall, with the right perspective in the image. A fun detail is that I did not own a camcorder when I decided this, I got one just before summer this year, for general purposes mind you.

Execution

I positioned the camera where I thought people would most likely have their heads while sitting down and took a picture of my tape square, this is required for the editing later. To be able to recreate the camera angle and lighting of the scene I measured the position of the camera in relation to the wall and ceiling, as well as the position of the only light source in the room.

When I happened to have a friend over and nothing else was planned, I used him for the photo shoot. We went into the cellar and looked up a nice spot. With us we brought the following:

• A work light with breaker – to see what we were doing
• A detatched desktop lamp with bulbs – for lighting the scene
• Frosted glass from a ceiling lamp – to dim the light
• My DSLR including a cable remote
• The camcorder
• Extension power cords and a power strip

At the location we rigged the camera, measured the position, tried out the lighting and snapped a bunch of photos. We actually got it wrong the first time and had the camera looking into the corridor instead of facing the wall, so we had to redo it. The second time we emptied a storage room just inside the corridor and crammed my friend and the camera including tripod in there, a tight fit! This way we could get the correct angle while keeping the right distance.

Back at the computer we picked out the best photo, being the one with the least blur even though I had better faces in some of the others, and distorted it so it would fit the marked area in the bathroom. I had to clone a part of the wall to fill out a corner, nothing too complicated. See the below representation of the steps to get an idea of what I mean.

To get the anamorphosis to work while looking at it through a mirror I had to mirror the image before printing. I used my B&W A4 laser printer to try if it would actually work, and it did!

You need to have your head at the right place, but then it looks quite convincing! It is a bit more sensitive to your viewing angle than I expected, this due to the short distance between you and the picture, but hopefully it will startle at least someone :)

Below you have a short video depicting the process, also available at Youtube!

This is my graduation picture from 2002.

I made this after graduating from my gymnasium studies (senior high school). In Sweden it is a tradition to wear a white hat when ending your studies and escape into the free(?) world of grownups. Taking the photos involved carrying a whole car-full of furniture into a photo studio and close co-operation with the photographer.

Something I have been asked quite a few times is how we made the water pouring. It is really quite simple, I poured the water into a bucket and then held the glass where the photographer said I would. He compared the picture he just took with what he saw in the camera. In the end it looks like I held my glass under the stream of water.

This summer I was asked if I could help out with a graduation photo for a friend, and I was happy to oblige. The idea was to make something along the lines of my own graduation picture, seen above, with clones of oneself.

We spent some time sketching out a few concepts and quickly decided what to do. As she loves her car, and the fact she graduated in health care, a montage of her running over herself while trying to save herself with her own car seemed like a good idea.

To stop the car from leaning this way and the other, due to its’ suspension, we elevated it with three carjacks. She then posed for all the different characters while I snapped the pictures via a radio remote. People were constantly biking or walking past us, between the camera and the car, but we managed to take the last shot just before the clouds broke up and we had full sunshine. Phew!

The work in Photoshop went very smoothly. After correcting the gamma and position of all photos I simply cut her out from the different layers. There are hardly any overlays where she covers herself in another picture so it was a straight forward process. The slightly more challenging part was the heart massage, and the very funny part was to add the blood splatter… which surprisingly was accepted for the final version which was used for printing!

In the end all parties were happy with the result, I think :) hopefully this little project made the experience of graduating even more fun, I enjoyed it at least!

In August 2004 I was about to fly to London with my cousin to try and get a bit of game time with Halo 2 before it was released. I sent pictures and descriptions to the people I was going to visit while there, so we could actually recognize each other. I had only chatted and socialized with them on a forum previously. One spontaneous reaction to my picture was…

<Stuntmutt> Boll – your head looks the same either way up!

I had sent the picture to my cousin as well, we had not met in eight years at that point so I wanted him to recognize me, we had only been chatting for a few years after finding each other on ICQ. I also sent him this quote as I thought it was quite funny. He promptly photohacked my picture so my head was indeed upside down! He had moved the mouth and nose so they were in my forehead and painted over my original mouth and nose.

Recently I remembered this and decided I would try to recreate it myself, just without moving the nose and mouth and with much higher quality pictures, a small photographic project. I present the result below!

The creation process was quite straight forward. I posed and took a number of pictures with with different hand postures, then I moved the main light source from the ceiling to the floor and angled my head in the opposite direction (both vertically and laterally) compared to the camera. Not meaning that I looked backwards, just as much down as I looked up, and right as I looked left.

In Photoshop I (relatively) simply rotated my second image 180°, extracted my head, put the hand on top, fixed the transition between my neck and head, adjusted the levels and voilá! Nightmares included!

A side note is that I did the actual photo shoot at 1:30AM the night to Sunday. This because I usually shave before going to church service Sunday mornings, and I needed the facial hair for the transition, but as I had a bunch of people at my place until midnight so I could not start earlier! It took me a while to set things up too, the camera, remote shutter, external viewfinder (14″ TV), lighting and positioning. I also took a shower before posing, so summed up it got kind of late! Even so I ended up quite satisfied with the result :)