We live in buildings and yet we somehow cannot bridge the gap between the inside and the outside, between technology and tradition. We look at the outside of a building, then we look at the inside, but perhaps we should look more often at both together because if we do not then how can we get the two to work together,
Imagine that when it comes time for remodeling instead of painting all four walls of a room we painted two interior walls and then painted the exteriors of the same walls. Perhaps if we spent time studying the relationships between the two sides of the same wall we would get a better understanding how well or not it is working for our needs.
I like a good main subject with a lot of contrast separation from it's surroundings - like a person standing in a field where you only see grass around them is more interesting than a mere field of grass. Similarly my images involving pastel shades are pretty hopeless too - I am simply a strong image person, hence my liking for architectural forms.
Funnily enough, the strong subject does not have to be saying anything in itself, it just has to be. I will supply the idea it could express. A block of flats is, well, a block of flats, it just is.
On an information level, a picture is just one more group of data, not much different to a book or a set of accounts, or a tree. Pages of a book scattered around lose their cohesiveness, and to make anything from them you either have to rebuild the book or step back and perhaps make a collage from the sheets that give a result larger than the sheets.
If you have a block of data there are many things that you can do with it and much you cannot - unless you expend an awful lot of effort, such as to deduce the existence of space travel from sheets of financial data from a blanket factory. If we ignore the methods of deductions, then the most likely route to success is to work on the data in a way that accepts the nature of the data.
For photo editing, some pictures have better possibilities for working contrasts than others, such that it is easier to cut the man out of the picture of the man-in-field than to do anything similar to the grass-only image. On the other hand, we could convert the grass into some kind of generic photo overlay more easily than we could the one with a man in it, because fairly uniform overlays don't have awkward contrasts that might seriously effect the subject of the image being overlaid.
Therefore, by examining any particular image, then with experience we can judge which methods are more likely to be successful, and I chose images where contrast-type methods are more likely to work. In this picture there is a strong separation between building and sky, so I know I can quickly chop the original sky away and replace it with something else - in this case a layer of blue shaded from dark at the top to light at the bottom, inserted behind the image of the block.
The original picture was taken on a sunny day, but with some fiddling I made it look as if it were evening. I added the balconies on the left hand side of the picture, the new sky and the frame - all in all it took me several hours and the result was a solid image. Nice, but that is all it was. I had expended a lot of my skill and a little of my imagination to produce a new version of the image, one with even stronger contrasts in it. But it did not say anything to me, it was just 'nice'.
I took a short break and thought about how society feels about blocks of flats, I thought about some recent images I had seen on Saatchi, and decided to tear away parts of the new image, and insert the old one behind it to add that feeling of anarchy that sadly so often reigns high in blocks in poorer areas. It took about five minutes to rip into the image, to produce this final version.
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