Eyes.
This was all part of a bigger experiment. I wanted to take something that had a lot of visual strength and then play with it using various toys to see whether the strength carried through.
I started with a tightly cropped shot of a young lady’s eyes. Our brains are very good at spotting eyes in a scene and evaluating them, so the theory went. The eyes act as a mental trigger which demands attention. Are they those of a lover across a room or a predator in the undergrowth (or vice versa :) )?
Well, the experiment was curious and interesting. Even highly manipulated or de-emphasised variants retained the alarm signals of being watched.
Two things surprised me though. In some of the variants my brain registered the eyes as those of a cat rather than a person - definitely looking for predators then! And then for some other variants the eyes took on a horror movie aspect: something was wrong and unhealthy. This particularly affected the painterly treatments where eyes were smudged out of shape, or some lighting treatments where the eyes glowed from within. Curious how our minds work.
This is the first and perhaps the wierdest variant of those I kept and liked. I thought it would be suitable for Sliders Sunday. It uses Topaz Glow to create this woven sinew effect.
Up close the image is a network of organic threads, but as soon as you step back the mind reconstructs the scene as eyes in a face, almost to the point where you can see the freckles. Curiouser…
The title is a Spoonerism that popped into my head at random a bit like Quantum spacetime. It amused me that the title and its complement both seemed relevant :)
I’ll post a link to the original source in the first comment so you can see how far we came.
Thank you for taking time to look. I hope you enjoy the image! Happy Sliders Sunday :)
Now all I have to do is work out how to publish the other ten variants without clogging up my photostream!
[Handheld outdoors in daylight.
Developed in Capture One heightening the colour and bringing out the blue in the blue-grey eyes.
Into Affinity Photo and thence to Topaz Studio using a Glow preset and then tweaking it to get a pleasing level of fibrousness. This version emphasises the shadows in the portrait so the face is fairly obvious even in close-up.
Just added the border back in Photo.]
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