Parsing Ardea Herodias

Day 124: I had never heard of David Hockney or "joiners" until the subject came up in a photographic forum and we were given the assignment to create a thingumabob in the style of what's-his-face. I googled the subject and got your typical assortment of fact and fallacy the internet serves up, but I believe I got a feel for what I was being asked to do. The problem was to find an appropriate subject for parsing into small pieces. Ideally, I'd have used a wildflower for the experiment, but a Great Blue Heron came along at the proper moment and here you see the result.

Artistic endeavours are not my long suit. I prefer recording nature as accurately as possible through my lens, at least most of the time. I occasionally venture into wild post-processing (especially if I've had too much caffeine or not enough sleep), but creating capital-A Art falls fairly far outside my purview. That said, I rather enjoyed sectioning Ardea herodias and reconstituting him in the transporter room of PaintShopPro.

From the original photo, I created a black-and-white enlargement which I then pasted and merged onto a white background at reduced opacity. Then I mapped offset sections of the original by pixel position, copied them and pasted them onto the b/w background, adding a slight drop-shadow around each one. These sections were also reduced in opacity. They were arranged using the snap-to-grid function so that they would be aligned vertically. When I was satisfied with the positioning, all layers were merged and the resultant image was copied and pasted over the color original, again at reduced opacity. Finishing touches included some light tone-mapping, lightening of the shadows and adjusting the contrast.

That's a lot to put a poor Heron through.