The Illuminated Man

[Bjørn Rørslett]

[ Posted 30 August 2013 - 10:11 By written agreement of 9 May 2015]

As a photographer, you sometimes get the strangest visions into your mind. Not always I am certain of their origin, but in this case it was plainly obvious. My memory still held recollections of the Sci-Fi literature I plowed through in my younger days. So the triggered response was instantaneous the moment this NEF screened on my work station.

The Illuminated Man anno 21st Century no longer has a forest to race in.

"By night the illuminated man raced among the trees , ...., his head like a spectral crown" J.G. Ballard (1964).

 


So what about this red shining area? Actually it's the manifestation of an IR hot spot .... But who cares when it works for you in an envisioned idea?

Captured with an IR-modified nikon D40x and the Zoom-Nikkor 25-50 mm f/4 lens. This is a fine performer in visible light, however in IR it may on occasion render a clearly defined hot spot.

[knb]

I think this image would have been dull(er) without that hot spot. Making it a contrasting colour underlines the illumination in my view. A pretty eerie (and maybe even scary) picture, I can just wonder how you came up with this. For the record I have plowed through Sci-Fi literature both in my younger and older days, so I can relate to that part.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

The idea manifested itself early as I became aware of a hot-spot issue already after a few test shots at the location. So I found there had to be a "running man with a crystalline crown" involved as well. Not easily implemented as I was alone in front of that building and couldn't call on any helpers. A timer release and persistence eventually made the bits and pieces come together.

Whether I indeed had succeed was unclear until the raw files were loaded and ready for viewing.

[HCS]

... Whether I indeed had succeed was unclear until the raw files were loaded and ready for viewing.

it would be interesting to see some of the outtakes.

Of course, great shot (but seen and commented on "elsewhere").

[Bjørn Rørslett]

I only keep and archive raw files that end up as processed and completed images. No way I am willing to drown in data files never to be used.

In fact, my work flow allows all captured files only to exist for a short period on a designated "bottle neck" disk storage. When files from a session are selected and processed, they are copied to a final destination on the network but left on the bottleneck. When the bottleneck storage threatens to overflow (a matter of time depending on the shooting activity), everything is deleted there and the process starts again.

On a trip, the bottleneck actually is the additional hard drive linked up to my laptop of choice for the occasion. Thus, the culling and weeding process already have commenced when I return and hence only a subset of the captured data would be transferred to the system bottleneck storage at home.

[Jørgen Ramskov]

I was thinking "The X-files" when I saw it.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

You haven't been raised on Sci-Fi presumably ? J.G. Ballard was one of those English writers who added weight to the genre and moved it above the naive space-war level. Another Brit well worth reading is J. Brunner whose novel "Stand on Zanzibar" contains a truly disturbing prognosis of the future. Disturbing because what he wrote is coming into being realities.

I'm no big watcher of TV and cannot remember having any knowledge of, or experience with,  these X-files. For me, "X-files" are something to do with Fuji.

[Jørgen Ramskov]

No, I haven't been raised on Sci-Fi, so my general knowledge is relatively limited. The X-files was a tv series about FBI agents Mulder and Scully that handles various mysterious cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files

[Bjørn Rørslett]

OK, I'm learning. Thanks for the heads-up.

[The_Traveler]

I have a first edition of the Drowned World, quite a wonderful book.

[Erik Lund]

Stanley Kubrick selfie movie set...

Very creative/artistic executed