The image here is a screenshot from the wildlife camera on a table at the end of the patio. The overlay is one of my photos of girders under Brighton pier. The composite is made in PhotoDirector with the low-opacity girders on the right.

The overwhelming imagery is light – diffuse, scattered, solid, bright, infusing everything around it. I’m not sure yet what I’ll do about the imbalance of the two sources – one LED white, the other warm white – and set side by side, but I am sure that supporting the light as the primary feature is the job I need to do. I’ve begun with a very bright underlayer.

Meanwhile – the Overlord

I need to think about this now. Thinking involves looking, squinting, creeping up on it, putting it on-screen where it looks like someone else’s, waiting till dark and looking again. It can take a while.

Sometimes I just go ahead without ceremony.

There are some interesting emerging shapes here which I want to encourage without losing their lack of resolution. It’s like seeing through a rainstorm on a window and I’d like to keep it that way by really pitching up the light sources, upgrading the reflections a little, and keeping that inadvertent horizontal dividing line across the centre.

The red is perhaps a little too strong in places although I’m hinting at red shift when most colours disappear in the absence of a light source. I can almost see the door and steps just above the ‘horizon’ so I’ll go in and gently strengthen these.

I have the flat roofed extension in position now which helps me see where everything else is before I bleach it with the flooding light. This is a camera effect; neither light is capable of so much reach but the water droplets on the lens have distorted them to improbability. The light on the left is from the back window of the extension, the other is the lamp outside the utility room. One is warmer than the other but, while faithful to the original, I didn’t like the imbalance that created; it felt distracting.

29th March. I have decided now is the time to stop. It’s a small canvas and I could fiddle away forever once I felt driven to deploy the close-vision glasses, but actually I like the way it looks from a distance when I can see it as a whole and unaided.

The images below are adjusted in PhotoDirector to compensate for the shine that dogs anything in acrylics under relatively bright light. Contrast is up a tad, as are ‘Dark’ and ‘Bright’. The end result is as close as I can get to the way I see it in the real world.

First the unaltered images, cropped and uncropped. The shine takes out the depth of colour, saturation, and essential darkness of the original.

Not perfect but less imperfect, to my eye, than the shiny ones.

Another tweak in PhotoDirector and I have the yellows under control by adjusting saturation and contrast. The animation below is made in MotionLeap and will be part of an alternative AR combination.

SCH 2024