My Happy Accident

Yesterday, I posted an image on my Facebook Fan Page that was created using a lomographic Holga 120 camera with a Polaroid instant back.  I have taken responsibility for creating it but it really was a happy accident - to some degree.  I had taken 4 shots of some candles in our bathroom using the Holga and scanned them into Photoshop.  I took the images and extracted useful portions that showed the flames and parts of the candles and merged them into the best of the photographs.  As I was doing this I was getting the "this is going to be a piece of crap" feeling.  Any creatives reading this post should understand what I mean, but just in case, let me explain.  The feeling I am referring to is one that, to me, means that I am doing something edgy that no one would appreciate - not even me (eventually), because this lack of appreciation would feed my insecurity as an artist!  My hand hovered the cursor over the "x" to close the file with no intention of saving.  However, as I started to process the image, adding layers, changing saturation, contrast and brightness, I started to see something interesting evolving but it still had an element missing.  What was missing was at first a mystery but soon I noticed that the image had no message or feeling to convey and again thoughts of trashing it started to surface.  I decided that all I could do is try to turn the image into a painting hoping the texture would save the piece.  It looked horrible!  DELETE! was my immediate response and it almost went bye, bye but I happened to notice the plastic wrap effect two selections over from paint daubs, one of my favorite artistic effects.  I had never used it before so I had nothing to lose here.  At the very least I would find out a bit about what it did.  I applied the default setting for plastic wrap and boy was I surprised.  Suddenly this image had a message; it became interesting.  It had texture - texture that was relevant to the image.  It looked like wax!