How did my solar photographs come about?
I had this old camera-phone that had a solar feature. Every time you took a photo it was a surprise to see how the color would be thrown. I discovered that the more photos I took (of the SAME object) the more color it threw onto the photo with each subsequent re-photo taking.
In order to do that I had to first physically take a photo, secondly, place the solar feature photo on my computer again, third take yet another photo with the solar feature on my camera of the photo placed on computer screen.
This sample photo gives you an idea for example – like rings of a tree… each layer of color that was thrown onto the original photo was a separate re-photographing of that same original photo and it required me to:
1-Take the photo
2-Download photo from camera onto my computer
3-physically take the photo again off of the computer again using solar feature
And as each ring indicates
4-continue to take the photo and place it on my computer again to
5-Retake the photo yet again, over and over sometimes to the point of making the original photograph (in this case a sunset, still somewhat recognizable) into an abstract
6-I repeated this process until I was happy with the photo-
What made me happy with the photo?
In some cases, the visual or object was completely obliterated in favor of colors thrown – sometimes just to see how far I could go with it, sometimes just to keep producing colors the continuing to increase the amount of colors on the page to the point of abstraction.
Sometimes though the original photo was really an abstract in that it was not a recognizable object to begin with. For example, on one trip to the airport I remember my husband asking me WHAT in the world I was taking a photo of as I stooped down to take a photograph of a step with a missing chunk of cement.
The reason I did such things is because I could never predict what might produce a really interesting photo. In fact, later on, viewing my work, my husband commented that a photo I had on screen was really nice -- and I had to laugh because THAT was the step at the airport with a chunk of cement missing from it!!
I had no control of how the colors would be thrown onto each photograph; the colors seemed to mostly skew oranges and greens, but it depended on the subject matter, lighting (things I didn’t control but just let flow). I took about 10,000 photos in this manner until my phone died. It was low resolution, so though I really liked them and others did too I was told that there was no way to correct the low resolution and therefore the photos were useless.
Now, maybe oddly, I see that people are actually trying to recreate pixilated photos; well I have many of these already done and available either as virtual NFT’s or even as prints that I have had made.