Project 29: A Multi-Facetted Image

When I read the brief for this project, I immediately thought of the location I wanted to use - the large stone globe at Durlston. Was I making life easier or more difficult by choosing a spherical object? I'm not sure, but I think it's the latter!

Due to the positioning of the Globe (see my last post), it is not possible to walk all around it at the same level to take photographs. The path is raised up behind the globe, and slopes down in front of it. My preferred arrangement for this montage would have been a circular layout, reminiscent of the petals of a flower, but it wouldn't have worked as I wanted, because of the different viewing angles. I therefore chose a side-by-side layout instead. Again, I shunned an opportunity to make things easier - rather than zooming out and taking shots of the whole globe from different angles, I zoomed in and took between three and six shots from each location. I chose to do this because I liked the 'patchwork' effect given by the montage in project 28, and wanted to carry it through to this image too.

In Photoshop, I loaded all the images as a stack, then began to arrange them. Where possible, I tried to roughly match layers by overlaying prominent words on the globe with the same word photographed from a different angle (e.g. the word 'ocean' remains a complete, readable word in the final composite). I erased parts of layers, to ensure that the top and bottom of the globe remained visible.

Here is the result:

Mercator, sixteenth century creator of the cylindrical map projection method still used today, wouldn't be too impressed... it's certainly no longer an accurate map of the World's surface. I remember studying cartography as part of my Geography degree - getting this map so wildly wrong rather went against the grain! However, this is art, rather than cartography, and if there's one thing that I've discovered, it's that I really need to loosen up and let my creative side out!

The reason that the images are not in a straight line is because of the angle at which I took the photographs - those in the centre were taken at the front of the globe, on a level with it. Those at the sides were taken from the raised path behind.

So there we go - my own interpretation of a multi-facetted image. Very different from Hockney's 'The Desk', which appears in the course materials, but I feel happy that it still fulfills the brief!