ghosts of amoebae

These are some extra shots I had from the series I recently posted at Osmosis. I like all the amorphous shapes that were formed out of this madness. I can't decide if they look more like ghosts or amoebae. But maybe amoebae have ghosts too, so perhaps it's both. Like I say in the post at Osmosis, I wanted to break the image down to basic light and dark tones to create something completely abstract. I went about this by shooting white styrofoam balls of varying sizes on white corrugated paper next to a large window facing west. I shot as the sun was setting so the light was coming directly through the window, which created sharp shadows from the styrofoam. That is where I concentrated my shooting, on the shadows, the "nothing in between" area. Then when I took the pictures I used several techniques simultaneously to really exaggerate the forms, the "abstraction heaped upon abstraction". First, I set my camera to overexpose the image making sure that the shutter speed was slow enough so that I could use camera movement as another effect. Then, I purposefully set the lens as out-of-focus as I could. When I took the picture I moved the camera in a variety of ways; across, up and down, zig zag, etc. at varying speeds. Then in my post-production, I added another level of abstraction by increasing the contrast as much as possible blowing out the highlights and darkening the shadows. I wanted to get as far away as I could from the way the actual "thing" I was shooting looked. I really like the way these images came out. Not sure if I achieved "a common truth of the human experience," but that is why I keep doing it and you never know it might just happen once.