What’s an Aesthetic? – 2

The source image in this post is very much like the source image in my previous post, What’s an Aesthetic? Early morning, misty, shooting from Hoboken toward Manhattan. So we’ve got the Manhattan skyline ghostlike in the background and, in the foreground, we have a street lamp (rather than a pair of banners).

Here’s three variations. Obviously I’m not trying to make these look like something your eye might have seen at the spot. I’m just playing around with the additive primary colors: red, green and blue.

Here I simply “inverted” the first image (swapping the original colors for their complements), which is easy to do in photoshop:

That too has its interest.

But this is something else, and rather more interesting, no?

Photoshop has a number of distortion filters. To get this image I used one called Twirl: Imagine the image floating on the surface of a pond. Now dip a stick in the pond and twirl it. I took the twirled version and blended it with the original, which is also easy to do in Photoshop. There are in fact endless ways to do it. So many I don’t remember just which one I used to get this one. I might not be able to reproduce it from the original.

Is that a feature or a bug?

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Many of the posts tagged “photography” raise similar issues.