I find the journey more intriguing than the arrival. After a professional career in consulting in one form or another spanning management and technology around the world, I have concluded, this week, that we see only a filtered fraction of what is around us.
As we heard in the COVID enquiry (7 Dec 23), the Civil Service had lost its folk memory of major pandemic and failed to see it coming quickly. The pandemic wasn’t until it was, despite endless reports pointing at holes in the country’s preparedness. We have trashed our living environment but wander looking the other way until we are hit by the truck we think isn’t there.
There is no certainty in my wanderings except our ending. However, my journeys are peppered with the unspoken challenge, ‘what can we do with this?’ or perhaps ‘what is this telling us?’. This may be just an echo of the oft repeated head question, threading through Quaker thought and practice, ‘what do YOU think?’.
My images are forming a travelogue on a route only I can navigate. However, I am happy to share these postcards from where ever I am. Who knows, you might be passing and give a friendly wave, unless you don’t.
Web site: http://www.markpercival.uk
E-mail: contact@markpercival.uk
Chalford Mill pond displacement mapped with beech leaves.
I have recently discovered ‘displacement mapping’ following an RPS Creative Eye Group workshop. The function adds texture to a prime image through distortion created by a second image. The image talks to me of the water’s power to both be calm and kind and to rage and swirl, while at the same time be one with the sky from whence it came.
Brimscombe canal marker displacement mapped with tree trunk
This is a stone distance marker on the Thames and Severn Canal at Brimscombe near Stroud. The distance marker plate has gone. Using the marker image as primary and a tree trunk image as texture using displacement mapping, the old distance marker is dissolving into dissolving into the bank, stone returning to earth.
My stainless steel water bottle deserved another look. Lighting and a close up view opened a new spectral feast. One I will probably revisit.Stuff, especially the mundane, is just waiting to be reformed into something worthy of more than a casual glance.
Taking a multiple exposure image of rose blooms in our garden, I applied displacement mapping to give it a painterly look using texture from a picture of autumn cob nut shell fall. The roses stand out on their own, a song of colour and pleasure to feel the light. The colour now jumps off the bloom even more excited at the day.
Herts Foto Forum 