December 20, 2015

Glowing Wood

Finally! Today I took two shots specifically for abstractification - and merged them into one.
I'm not very deep into Photoshop layers but always wanted to create something from different shots. In this case one shot is sharp and the other was defocused. After fiddling a bit around with the transparency and the different ways to merge layers in Photoshop I got a result that was close to what I imagined:

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Hope you like it (should be viewed larger: just click on the image)!

December 10, 2015

Swarm of Lights

When visiting Vienna I did a lot of night-shots. The colors and the contrast at night are pretty fascinating and many buildings are illuminated in interesting ways. It was then when I shot my only "abstract" - and that was unintentionally: I just dropped the camera from my eye although the 1/8 sec of exposure was still running! Thought it made a nice effect with the Opera as a backdrop for the "swarming" street-lights. Swarm_of_Lights_89027

September 06, 2015

Lichter Raum - light room

Same exhibition (see preceding post), next room, and again: a sculpture and a title referring to "light".
This time made from poplar wood by Joseph Stephan Wurmer in 2013.
The sun was behind the clouds in this shot which helped reduce my own shadow on the sculpture. The shadows cast by the window behind me still helped frame the object. And an interesting leg of a visitor walking away from the sculpture in the dark is a nice bonus, I think: gives you an impression of the size (65x115x115 cm).

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Sin Luz - without light

...is the title of the sculpture I shot at the exhibition of the NN-Kunstpreis. It is constructed from thousands of plastic dishes hold together by paper-clips by Frank Dimitri Etienne. With 2.8m in diameter it's pretty large.
Interestingly (and luckily) the sun was shining right onto the sculpture and what I captured in my shot is one of the first impressions I got when I entered the room: fascinating, like an alien deep sea fish. Funnily the sculpture would have been pretty dull without light, so its title "Sin Luz" is a bit of a misnomer.

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As always in my Blog you can click on the images to view a large version. Enjoy!

May 15, 2015

Not so chaotic

Went to one of my favorite locations the other day and discovered the following nice pattern: Pattern_77533 And although it was created by random effects the end-result was not as chaotic as one might have expected. Well: arrange one-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional space with almost no gap and some kind of order will be imposed ;-) Click through to the image in more enjoyable sizes.

January 04, 2015

Visit Gerhard Richter

Just came back from the exhibition "Ausschnitt" (probably best translated in this context with "Extract") in the Neue Museum in Nuremberg. It shows a good selection of Gerhard Richter's work starting with a series of 31 monotypes (prints) from 1957 (see below) and 27 other images both figurative and abstract up until 2003. (As usual you can click through the images below to get to the large originals on flickr; just use "view all sizes" there).

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An interesting aspect of his work is that he often used photographies (his own or from magazines) as original from which he painted. These images show a characteristic haziness like a blurred photo, which makes it quite obvious that the images were painted after a photo and not after a real life scene.

Sometimes Gerhard Richter covered those photographic images with an abstract layer of paint with only parts of the "original" image shining through. All-in-all a very interesting discourse about photography and painting making you think about the relationship of both art-forms.

Here's another picture from the exhibition showing other works:

 Gerhard_Richter_73354

The exhibition is open until February 22nd. Highly recommended!

January 01, 2015

Abstract Pattern

I didn't notice them but my wife had a keen eye for these patterns. We shot a whole series of these and the following is my favorite: it shows some repeating structures without being geometrically perfect and I like the fade-out of focus to the right which makes it look like a receding wall - which it isn't.
Developed in black and white (but there was not much color to begin with) it remembered me a bit of some paintings by Gerhard Richter we just visited before in the Neue Museum in Nuremberg.

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