Assignment Number Three in my Computer Applications class is to create an image in the illustrious Photoshop CS3. The more fantastical it is, the better. Using portraits and at least one scanned image, we'll each create something awesome.
We also go through a printing demo that day, as the printers at school are very expensive and no one wants to fuck with something that costs more than their yearly salary. So my instructor Brett is talking and he says,
"Now, the ink that goes into this machine is ridiculously expensive. There are eight ink cartridges in this machine. To fill each of these is somewhere around 300 dollars. So you never want to make a "bad" print. Even more so, you never want to pump out bad print after bad print, and I've seen this happen." He laughs a little. "It's sort of like... and I'm struggling for an analogy here... It's like you have two identical doors in front of you. Stay with me, two doors, and behind one is something nice and good, say, I don't know, a frappuccino." He laughs again. "What lies behind the other door, should you so choose it, is a surly-looking guy with a boxing glove, and he immediately punches you in the face, and the door closes." He looks around again. The class is alternating between giving him incredulous looks and falling out of their chairs. "Obviously," he concludes, "you want that frappuccino."
My fantastical image, I think, is going to be this image of the two doors. This is what I'm shooting for, though I'm not entirely sure I'll achieve it, so I have a backup plan, which I won't unveil, mostly because it's going to be a cop-out and not creative and most likely second-rate. We're shooting for that frappuccino.
My scanned image is from Eugene Atget; a shot from his Paris series. I would post an image of it, but Blogger doesn't support .TIFF files, and I can't change it from here...
My plan is to utilize the curved archways as "openings" and I have pictures of a frappuccino, and then I'll take a picture of Zeb with a boxing glove. Looking surly.
