Certain things we walk on, stand on, spill and spit on, perhaps even puke on.
We take them for granted, but we never take a look. Here I did the opposite, have a look, look around...
The pavement is an overlooked gallery: images from the stone and asphalt ages...
This started as a pile of totally underexposed, blurred streetshots.
Worse, underexposing apparently tilts the whole spectrum so all hues collapse into a murky orange.
Like earlier times colour negatives. Or photos from Mars...
Then I tried the 'Adjust Level' command, and the scenery shifted. Both colours and contrast jumped from one extreme to another.
And the result looked like something from the other end of time; all those cracks in the pavement, stones and asphalt,
reminded me of drawings in ancient caves. Writings on neolithic walls, grafitti from stoned ages...
And so my useless pile found an interpretation after all.
Later I even found some matching dayshots. Details are not the point this time (and space)...
Autoadjusting the images changed both colour and contrast a lot,
and some people would consider this a de facto special effect.
But I disagree, because no object has a fixed 'natural look'.
Change a simple factor as the amount of light, and you change an objects visibility.
You also change their colour intensity, as our cromatic vision fades with light.
At night we still see dark versus brigth, but the nocturnal spectrum contains almost no hues...
Then again, like many other animals we usually sleep through the night and roam at day.
Colourvison during the day has some advantages; consider red berries among green leaves.
Any grayscale version would hide all fruits and flowers, but colours expose them...
Mads Dam, April 2008