Photo contest: post processing #5 (English)

Photo contest: post processing #5

(German version here: https://steemit.com/hive-155041/@ty-ty/photo-contest-post-processing-5-deutsch)

Where do I start? Alphabetically, chronologically? Forwards, backwards? I think I'll comment on the wonderful contributions in the order in which they were posted, i.e. chronologically. All the following evaluations are my personal opinions and purely subjective; I make no claim to general validity with them, and I don't want to offend or offend anyone. I was really happy about every entry, and the fact that there were not more was perhaps due to the fact that the picture I suggested or the questions I asked were considered boring by participants of earlier Bambuka contests.

Oh, I may correct myself a little bit here in the new typing now: there were two more contributions shortly before the closing time! Thanks to the late entrants! Their meteorites hit when I had already been offline.
How does it look now, what comes to mind, how do I create comparabilities (- if they make any deeper sense)?

I myself had expected that sections of my photo would be formed, perhaps a zoom to the staircase with the people or to the seven little trees on the right, standing there like seven pointed caps of seven dwarfs, or to the wall with the damaged paint in contrast with the well-kept building. Or a detail with something completely unexpected for me. However, all the contributions concentrated on the main subject, the building: Bellevue Palace in Berlin.

Some contributions found out about this individuality of the building after research or recognised it at first or second glance and then took it into account in the post, in the work. This was possible, but not necessary, and one post shows how one can get into a freer direction, so to speak, without the knowledge of Bellevue Palace, escape through a little door in one's thinking.

A castle is a locked building. I don't know what the situation is in other languages (Russian, Spanish) with the word relationship in question. In German it is no coincidence. It comes from Latin and is related to enclosure and abbey. A castle is a non-public building, it is private, typically within the so-called aristocracy, a privileged class or caste compared to workers and burghers, which still exists in Europe. But even in countries like Germany, which no longer accepts aristocracy, castles still symbolise the seclusion, the wealth, the privileges of past and contemporary elites. A former royal palace as the official residence of the Federal President still stands for the aloofness of governments; purpose-built buildings such as the Chancellery are literally also "castles", namely only accessible to the general public on open days. Other former royal castles, however, have been converted into museums or historical attractions.

It seems to me that all participants had these thoughts more or less clearly in mind when they started their contributions. The concept of the building as a golden cage remains, quite abstractly, in its own way even with a "castle" (an ambiguous word in German: fürstliches Gebäude vs. Verriegelung, castle vs. lock). That is why the building remained as a whole, and no section was detached and isolated in such a way that the castle became completely irrelevant as a palace or a sealed-off building.

All but one of the participants dealt with the castle, but no one left it as such. It was philosophically questioned, playfully made fun of, surrealistically alienated or dissolved in aesthetic transparency. Then, finally, there was the political caricature that explicitly refers to the building in its current function as the office of the German Federal President, and before that, however, there was also an association as a prison, not for people, but as a prison of thinking.

I consider this diversity great, thanks again to all participants! It seems to me that other participants would not have been able to contribute much else, but nevertheless I would have been very happy to be taught better and to be surprised by @lllll1ll and by @manuelgil64 and some others ;-)

Now a few of my thoughts on the individual contributions before I end by trying to name the one I personally like best. (That's going to be pretty hard!)

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1 )
@barski
https://steemit.com/hive-185836/@barski/photo-contest-post-processing-5-creators-of-red-lines

The self-chosen motto or theme of the red lines runs as a connecting thread through the post and through the complex image. Barski literally begins with Adam and Eve, with the surely well-known legend of the expulsion of the ancestors of all humans from paradise. The development of his thoughts ends with a web of red lines in which the whole world is entangled. This net is projected onto the building because it symbolises the rulers who draw red lines as they please.

What I would like to emphasise most in the editing steps is that Barski implements an idea that has often crossed my mind: he does what was known before the age of digital post-processing as "double exposure", which means taking two shots at the same point on the film in order to superimpose two images. In Barski's work, shown here and described instructively, I think this is very well done.

In a figurative sense, I could perhaps say: Barski visualises a threatening out of the shadows behind the obvious reality. But that's not all, there is a "triple exposure", a third photo as the top layer, the foreground: the new usurper of power on his way to its centre, seemingly unimpressed by the network of red lines.

For more details, I refer you to Barski's post, especially because of the red eye. I like the result very, very much, and I also like the way described to get there - and last but not least: that the goal was not fixed from the beginning, but that the author kept himself open for interactions with his work. I personally appreciate that: planned, but not stubbornly fixed.

Overall: 10 points out of 10, if I imagine such a scale.

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2 )
@udabeu
[no post - no link]

No post of its own, and therefore not really valid as a contribution, but two pictures whose motto seems to be just for fun, at least that's what the headline in the comment suggests. We readers only get further information from a short comment exchange with Barski; from this it emerges that Udabeu had used a so-called "AI Image Generator" ("a machine learning toolkit to generate images from text") to create these images.

My knowledge of this is very limited, but I suspect that Udabeu "tweaked" parameters and selected from results, so that this process, although he does not explain it to us, resembles post-processing: playful attempts to manipulate an image and gradual emergence of at least a visual idea, albeit without any reported documentation or story.

I further suspect that the AI has drawn on images from its database to extract elements and stylistic features and integrate them into the source image. Perhaps Udabeu will provide some more information on this.

The use of such a tool raises interesting questions, possibly similar to those discussed about 150 years ago when photography was preparing to enter the world of painting-art. At that time, photography as a possible form of art seemed to many to be a fundamental contrast or even a contradiction to the art of painting, which was consciously created with pigment and brush. What about so-called AI? Ultimately, it is the user who decides on the result, i.e. the human being, not the machine.

Personally, I find Udabeu's result convincing enough that I would hang it up as a picture, the first of the two. The second would be too cartoonish for me; of course, that's a matter of taste.

Udabeu's contribution is out of competition, since it went without a post, but I'll still give it a rating on my scale here: 8 out of 10 points for result #1.

I consider the discussion about the fundamental question of the character of such image processing, which has certainly been going on for a long time (in other places), to be exciting and open to results, although I myself am currently still about 70% "against" it, because too many hidden parameters work for me in the tool and I could not control which images it should access and which not. However, such a tool, to which I could assign my own image database as limits, would be highly interesting to me and would overcome my reluctance. But that is a wide field and requires further posts and discussions ;-)

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3 )
@evagavilan
https://steemit.com/hive-185836/@evagavilan/concurso-de-fotografia-post-procesamiento-5

Eva's dream of colours, a theme found in the subconscious, so to speak, is reported and grandly realised in the picture. It is the dream of a colourful society, it seems to me, of liveliness and togetherness instead of black and white thinking and exclusion. The transformation of the ancient fire alarm into an amphora that pours out colours like wine, and the crescent moon embedded in the black sky as if in velvet, which seems to give its blessing to the outpouring of colour - in my (art-historically only poorly trained) eyes, this is a magical surrealism that I silently marvel at and allow to take effect on me. A play with archetypes, it seems to me, brought out of a subconscious and flowing almost directly back into my own subconscious, so that I really can't put it into words any better.

My personal rating: 10 points out of 10

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4 )
@esthersanchez
https://steemit.com/hive-185836/@esthersanchez/photo-contest-post-processing-5

Esther invites us to jump back in time, to the year 1900, by imagining that the picture she has created was created around then. She reduces the pictorial elements after previous small processing steps to a kind of charcoal drawing. Surprisingly, this makes the building shown light and transparent, almost translucent. At the same time, weights seem to shift so that the castle becomes light. This makes me think, not about the Federal President, but about seeing. Perhaps such a drawing would not have struck me at all in 1900, but in 2022, in an age of floods of images, it has a calming effect on me, and it whispers to me that copperplate and wood engraving, etching, charcoal or pencil drawing are far from being obsolete.

My personal rating: 9 points out of 10

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5 )
@michelangelo3
https://steemit.com/hive-185836/@michelangelo3/photo-contest-5-by-bambuka

Michelangelo the Third shows a possible escape route from the prison of thought. A pleasantly luxurious-seeming ideology building houses the ideas there as a guarantor of security in his account. Three guards have a double task here: they don't let anything in, but they also possibly don't let any idea out into reality, into freedom, where it can live and prove itself. But the Golden Cage has a small door, and it is unhinged - how could this happen? Has something escaped, has something entered? Is it a trap?

My personal rating: 9 points out of 10

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6 )
@peppermint24
https://steemit.com/hive-185836/@peppermint24/a-day-like-nearly-everyone-else-in-the-capital-city

Prince Peppermint submits as an entry a political cartoon in the form of a three-part picture story. Further episodes or pictures have been announced, I am curious. In the first picture, the scene still seems "neutral": a postman is dropping in bundles of letters. It could be fan mail for the castle's resident(s). The second picture becomes clearer: bills! More precisely: "quarterly bills for war and climate", as the Chip-or-Chap-messenger announces. An explosive topic at present, but one that is all too readily concealed and kept quiet. Consequently, we learn in the third picture that there is nothing to see here - although "the hut is burning", a visualised metaphor. I like that kind of thing, even if it may be placative.

My personal rating: 8 points out of 10

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Total score: 54 points out of 60 (or 46 out of 50) - congratulations! And I thank all participants once again!

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Finally, all that remains is to say: I need an octagonal room. So let's imagine for a moment that I have one - then I would have the entrance door in one of the eight walls, hang this writing of mine in a frame on the opposite wall and your contributions on the remaining six walls! That would be an exhibition in which your pictures would look at each other, illuminate each other, amuse each other, comment on each other, add to each other, rethink each other. Perhaps in this octagonal room, music would play all day, "Pictures at an Exhibition" on continuous loop, and visitors should try to match each of your works with one of Mussorgsky's musical pictures. When we have collected six hundred ballots, we will make a statistical evaluation of the most frequent assignments.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

"Feuermelder. Berechtigt zum Melden ist, wer die Brandstelle angeben kann."
"Fire alarm. Anyone who can indicate the location of the fire is entitled to report it."
photo: ty-ty