Pastel Pop

Pastel Pop — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 400 | EXP 1/400

In taking a top-down approach we can process the world around us differently. This may be one of the most basic photographs I have posted to this site, and yet I find it endlessly captivating. It has a real watchability if you’ll allow me to use words that read like they don’t belong in a dictionary. Seriously, I fully anticipated the red-dotted line to appear under watchability—I would have lost any and all bets on that being a word. Anyway. I find myself mesmerized as I look down and into this image, losing myself for minutes at a time. Its tight reticulated pattern reminds of an autostereogram—those mind-melding 2-D images that are supposed to reveal a 3-D scene within its otherwise non-specific pattern. These drove me nuts as a kid. I can remember numerous class trips to several museums where we’d inevitably find ourselves in the obligatory gift shop where we’d one-by-one try our hand at discerning the image. My friends would undoubtedly make it work within a few minutes, and there’d I sit, dejected and unable to make out any kind of scene. My brain couldn’t get past the replicant TV snow presented in technicolor splatter. It always bummed me out as I feared my eyes and brain were somehow broken—somehow a failure of intelligent design. While I still can’t find any kind of image waiting to burst forth from this photograph, nor do I think there’s anything specific hiding in there, it sure is fun to look upon. Far less stressful than classmates bleating out, “there’s the horse! Can you see it, Greg? It’s right there!”

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