Make a set of ten photos which take something familiar to you–a town, building, object, etc–and defamiliarize it, make it seem foreign. Use a mix of extreme closeups, weird lighting, foreground/background focusing and odd angles and other effects to make something that you know very well seem like something you’ve never seen before, something spooky and/or luminous and/or magical.
The process:
These were taken with an old Polaroid camera, which was the only thing I had around when my digital camera battery died during this weekend’s road trips (of course, I forgot the charger). At any rate, the photos were taken in and around an ice cream shop were I used to work. I don’t have any pictures of the shop around, but think the opposite of what these imply: a little walk-up window with crisp white paint framed with red accents; tons of brightly colored sugary things to put on desserts lined up inside, etc.
At any rate, I got these, cropped the Polaroid frame out, and then added some effects in Picnik to amp up the creepiness. The originals (before the Picnik editing) are here, just in case anyone is curious about the effect levels. I added contrast (usually through Picnik’s shadow tool, which I found to be more subtle) and then ran them all through the “gritty” effect, which adjusts exposure and then uses a fade slider to blend the effect into the original photo. Some of the look also came from these being physical photographs. I had them in my bag and a few of them got kind of beat up. All the white dots and scratches were a result of that, and the gritty effect just made them a bit more visible.
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