Iterations & Inspiration

 Creating iterations, variations on themes, is a very important practice that serves an artist well. I often tell my students to create several variations on a given image. To go beyond just what may come easy and more deeply explore what an image could become. And I have found that the passage of time is unimportant, that an image originally created many years ago can be a fine candidate for a new iteration and inspiration. The image above is a very apropos subject for just that idea. 
 

The original image for this was initially created as a background for a product image using Polaroid Type-55 Black and White film many years ago. I loved this image as it was better than the ad image. I felt (and still do) that it stands on its own as a beautiful work of inspired art. I wrote a whole other blog post going into detail of how it was created on analog film here. 
 

As much as I loved the original image for many reasons, I decided to explore the “something more” of creating iterations of it many, many years after its creation. I chose one of my custom color Cine LUTs (DUNE 04) to give it a kind of nostalgic, old paper feel. And while I liked this version, and added some digital Clarity and Sharpening to enhance the natural Polaroid and color film grain structure, I couldn’t help feeling the image wanted something more, something this iteration wasn’t quite accomplishing. 
 

It was when I took my own advice and explored further iterations of the image, this time choosing another of my custom Color LUTs (Color Neg) that I felt the image had finally become what it wanted to be, what it was meant to be. This iteration has the right feel to me. It reminds me of the very cool and beautiful color grading and film technique used in the film “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”, one of my very favorite films. There is something in the reversal of the tones, of making the Polaroid negative into a positive, which I had not thought to do at the time it was photographed, I stopped at the negative image before me because I thought that was the best it could be. I thought it was truly inspired and unique (which it was), but I didn’t explore it further as I have now. It now has a more unique quality that the original lacked, not that it isn’t a beautiful image in its own right, but that process of iterating, even years apart has such a value to the creative process.