Projection: ra·di·ance in Music | Oonagh
/Above: Projection of original cover art for Neon Bible by Tracy Maurice and François Miron for Arcade Fire with Merge Records.
There has always been a place for rhythmic sounds that can communicate our feelings." Exploring your mind: Psychology
My daughter has a very hectic schedule. No, we really are not one of those who overschedule kid's, not that there is anything wrong with being an active family. She has passions and drive all her own thank you and we support them. But behind every drawing, every book or math problem has always been music. When daily life stress overwhelms her, she soothes with music either dancing with her headphones or drawing to music. When she is elated-music! No surprise she plays like a thousand instruments.
And in between, she puts up with me taking thousands of photos and documenting her passion and life. We had fun playing with a projector last week! On the occasion of Oonagh’s birthday, for the very very very tentatively titled "Oonagh's favorite songs" project we have been working on off and on for over a year. This in no way encompasses all the music she loves…hopefully the project will continue on!
Above: Projection of original art by JR: Everything Now installation for Arcade Fire. More about the artist JR and musical artists Arcade Fire here. This photography by Anjeanette Photography. Visit Arcade Fire
Above: Ólafur Arnalds albums “Re:Member” (in blue) and “For Now I am Winter” (grey).
A little about the images I photographed: For the B0RNS album, we built the cover design set with nothing but painted paper- even the white shirt is white lacey paper! Ok, ok the suit is fabric, and her hair obvs. Next for the remaining album or single track art homages, we used a projector, not Photoshop. I love PS, this just wasn’t how we got the album art up for this ;) Other tools used were strobe Flashpoint falshes, a triangle prism, plastic sheets and blue gel squares. Originally the idea to do this began from recent experiments with gel lighting, then later I looked it up and saw that there is so much truth to the saying "there is nothing new under the sun"- because it seems like everyone is getting some awesome artistic photography going with projectors recently!! Heck yeah! Don't worry about that, don't let the fact that there is nothing new that hasn't been done discourage you. Do it anyway, play with your art because it has never been done by YOU, and your voice like music is what unites us. SO, ANYWAY, I was checking out some Jake Hicks gel lighting tutorials on ProEDU (as recommended by David Byrd) ...and I saw a Jake Hicks projector mini tutorial. Then I started playing! I held up a piece of clear plastic for the ghosty white in two of these, and a prism for the one (bouncing it off the projector light because I was standing right next to it in that one- don't think it would work from another angle bc besides the strobe to light to light her face no light in the room) So you can totally get flare and prism and those effects really easily in PS and I do all the time, art is art! We were just playing and sometimes its fun to see what can happen “in real life” I tried a projector that was basically my phone in a fancy cardboard box and it did NOT get great results. We used an Epson digital for this that I borrowed from my husband's studio. The colour was fantastic! I ran into issues Jake mentions like chromatic abrasion on wall image (esp with BW lines etc) and the ‘screen door effect’ where you see pixels so I pushed the projector as close to her as possible and unsharpened (blurred) the focus a tiny bit and that helps. I would love to try with a film slide projector! I still have slides of my old work!! One part I love less but is basically a PART you cant control is shadows- so she def is going to cast a shadow duh hahahh! I didn’t want just straight ahead perspectives however so ya gotta live with those. A few others I used a second gelled strobe and that was really great. Sooooo much angling so that the strobe doesn’t wash out the projection! We got clear mod heels and the white painter coverall from Amazon. It was the smallest they had but still 10 sizes too big for my girl so there are a lot of pleats and a tape belt. Smoke and mirrors baby. Oooh, I should have used some mirrors! Staring camera info (I changed it up as needed throughout- play with it!) iso100, 35mm, f/1.4-2.8, 1/200ss Epson printer tethered to Mac using HDMI cord. Sometimes we messed with the perspective and blur knobs. All rights and respect go to the music and artistic directors and original artists of the original images! DIrect credit as I could find it below each image, original images projected are only belonging to the artists created them and those they have agreements with etc. None of the original artwork projected belongs to me..