#54 – Retinal explosion
(Static render)
Panimating
It’s been a wet year in Australia, and the bush has grown up like crazy, leading the rural fire services authorities to trigger some preventive back burning fires. Among other consequences, I particularly enjoy the seasonal smell of wood fire, that’s one. And as comes the evening and the sun sets over the western line of horizon, the presence of smoke in the atmosphere sparks unreal colours in the sky.
Driving home the other day, I was left breathless and I had no choice but to stop the car in the Drummoyne boat ramp, allowing the few seconds I needed to seize the shot of the month.
I have shared this pic with my family, with my friends on social, and with the world on 500px, but I was left unsatisfied, some emotion unfulfilled. And that usually tells me I have to throw the subject on a digital canvas, with a faint hope to reveal the invisible.
Soundtrack: Pink Floyd – Two suns in the sunset (Final Cut, 1983)
Techniques: Hexels 2, Pixelmator, FX Photo Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro
Hexels is an amazing nifty creative tool, proposed by Marmoset. It allows to paint paint pixel images using hexagons, pixels, trixels, custom polygon shapes. For this exercise, I have been more specifically interested in its ability to paint using textured Voronoi cells, and that’s what I have applied to my sunset image. The idea of the meteorite came while playing with the various options of the software, and it made sense to perfect the “explosive” message of the shot, and reinforce the “end of the World” atmosphere induced by surrealistic colors.
The rest has been about fine tuning in Pixelmator and FX Photo Studio Pro. I was eventually quite happy with a close up of the meteorite, and a panimating version of the scene using simple Ken Burns effects in FCP.
Wide angle view
Original colors
Pushing into the yellow bitune
