Bullet of Faith
A bullet speeds out of a gun. Everyone knows how this sounds and how it looks. It is a standard subject in photography. It’s been captured by masters like Harold Edgarton – the father of electronic flash – and my mentor Andrew Davidhazy at MIT who caught a bullet piercing a playing card. It’s a familiar theme in photography. The camera sees faster than the eye and the idea.
Ideas evolve. They can take months, or years. This picture idea started inside a cathedral, with a digital image of a stained glass window. A medium telephoto zoom was used. Weeks later, a series of thoughts about setting the image in motion emerged. The thoughts all involved techniques from the digital toolbox: rotation, motion blurring, Gaussian blur, filters, and warping.
Time passed. Cogitation came between the computed photography and the ending concept. The window was rotated. Part of an idea emerged. A copy layer in Photoshop CS4 was filtered with the Flaming Pear Flood Filter Plug-in and left alone for awhile. Translucent motion blur on a layer created a visual sense of speed across the frame. Slowly, a picture of a stained-glass window changed from lead and glass back into a spiritual idea.
When I frame a photographic idea, I try to leave room for mystery. The faith-based title “Bullet of Faith” lets a viewer associate the picture with their own beliefs about faith.
Your photographs are your own faith. Load them with your vision. Others will fire them with their own way of seeing.
by Jim Austin.
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