Slate wall.
The Downing site is one of the two main city-centre sites for the University of Cambridge, housing predominantly biomedical science departments. I went there earlier in the year to attend one of over 400 free public lectures given as part of the University’s Science Festival.
The lecture, on "Playing Games like a Mathematician" was brilliant fun and given by Katie Steckles, a mad mathematician from Manchester University.
Did you know the record for completing Rubik’s cube from memory, one-handed, while blindfolded, is one minute 16 seconds? Well, feel your ignorance evapourate!
But I’m drifting as usual. The modern pedestrian entrance to the Downing site from the East is a staircase up from the lower street below. I noticed it had a curious and rather beautiful slate wall made of grey slates with thin layers of mortar between.
It strikes me as being a wildly inefficient way of making a wall. I can only assume it was done for architectural aesthetic reasons or perhaps as a way of reusing materials recovered from the buildings that occupied the site previously as a poignant memory of what went before - architects and planners like doing that in the UK it seems.
I had my trusty phone with me and I worked out that if I angled the lens in the right way I could get an image, not of flat layers, but of a star-burst of rays from one corner.
Hah! I thought. Such is the stuff... the making of a Sliders Sunday series.
And thus we have it…. This is the Sliders Sunday version. I’ll post the original in-camera image in the first comment, so you can see how far we came.
I’ve used the picture in various ways to make a short series of endpoints again, so you can see which you prefer (if any lol). I’m always interested to hear what other folk think.
I’ll also publish a black and white version done in Nik Silver Efex Pro as a straight rendition of the image.
Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Sliders Sunday!
[Handheld in daylight.
Processed as a black and white in Affinity Photo.
Taken into Topaz studio and used one of the AI Remix settings to create the colour and stripes.
Back into Photo and a simple single mirror in the distortion Mirror filter, playing about with different input and output angles and dragging the cursor around the image to find an interesting perspective.
Hues shifted a little using an HSL layer.
Sharpened using Unsharp Mask with that adjustment blended using Linear Light at reduced opacity.
Lighting filter with white light from top right and some texturing as well.
Frame formed by expanding the size of the canvas and having a dark blue fill layer underneath, then using Layer Fx to add a narrow white outline… then we are done.]
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