An Image in Mind

I have been feeling sick for the last week. Hence I have I done very little photography. This morning I lay in bed and read a book that Annika wanted me to read called “A Mango Shaped Space” about a thirteen year old girl that could see the colors of sound. The book was fictional but apparently there really are a few people that are born with this condition. Wow, that must be an amazing experience to be able to see colors from sound. The condition is called synesthesia.

After reading the book I started looking through some old photography magazines. In one of them was an image of a woman cutting through a power line with a pair of shears. Something in the description of how the image was created caught my eye. The sparks around the shears were created from separate images from a metal grinder. Immediately light bulbs went off in my mind as I visualized an image in my mind that I wanted to create. So I jumped out of bed and set to work on it.

I went out to the garage and grabbed my shop grinder and carried it into the kitchen and set it up next to the sink. Then I grabbed some black backdrop material and set it up behind the sink. I closed off the outside light from the window with another piece of black backdrop. Following that I grabbed a metal wood screw, some safety glasses and my camera which I set to manual mode.

Holding the camera in one hand to compose and the metal screw in the other hand against the grinder to create sparks was pretty challenging. I was able to get some excellent images of sparks coming off of the grinder after a few dozen tries. The effect was very cool.

The next part in the creation of this image was to combine several of the spark images into a circular pattern by layering all of them into one image. With a little bit of clean up it looked awesome. After that I looked through some of my marble images. I chose one to place in the very center of the final image I had in mind.

Please let me know what you think of it in the comment section below.

God’s blessings to all,

chris