This idea came to me quickly, which probably means that it isn’t such a good idea.
I immediately thought of the idea “parallel lives” and then began filtering through ideas: varied reflections (especially with fingers to explicitly visualize lines), positive/negative images digitally reflected, color contrasted images digitally reflected … none of them worked in my mind. I wanted to include the idea of will/choice somehow and none of those images would suffice.
A triptych could make sense, but how could I include visual parallels with the metaphorical? I thought about things that I look through that constrain my vision in some way: grates, rails, windows, doors. I recalled the images through doors that I had captured last year during my “6-feet apart” project and was immediately drawn to the idea of using the opening in a door as a metaphor for opportunity. The choices were fairly easy as they are same choices that I am confronted with every morning.
I didn’t even bother getting out the Olympus. It wasn’t needed; this is another digital project that was created as a proof-of-concept and is never going to be printed. A little noise or loss of detail wasn’t going to matter.
The creation of the image in GIMP was straightforward, really. I took the image of the door (taken from inside the master bedroom closet), cloned out the bed, lens-blurred the image, enlarged the canvas, and created the triptych. I then made a copy of the layer and made it very contrasty and black and white so I could create a mask with it. I saved the mask as a channel for future use and would apply it to each frame as I composited the choices. I (within reason) adjusted the white balance of each door to match the scene and then blurred the foreground of each image to better match the fall off between subject and door.
This an image that I really like, but am fully-aware will not resonate with an audience. It is not technically-superb (noise and sharpness are sub par and I could have spent more time masking the door and knob), it is not well-lit, and the messaging and image are very-meta. I might hate it next month, but – today – I like it … a lot.
