The Making of a Photoodle

The term “photoodle”, being derived from photo and doodle, implies a somewhat casual, haphazard process of creation. While much of my “cafe art” is carefully planned, a good deal just happens. This is the story of one such photoodle. It really is one of my favorites now.

It started a couple of years ago with an afternoon of shooting photos at the annual Gateway International Food and Music festival – always a wonderful experience. In going through my photos I found this:

A delightful photo but seriously marred by that horrible light fixture behind the left dancer. Once you see it you can’t enjoy the picture any more, that lamp just pops out at you and towers over the image. What to do? Clone it out!

While cloning out the lamp I also narrowed the space between the left dancers so they are more uniformly positioned. That also eliminated the speaker and passerby in back. Of course, the image needed to be cropped tightly. So here is the result:

Looks like a fine photograph, doesn’t it? But doing such major surgery on an image, for me, moves it out of the realm of photography and into digital art. In my case that means cafe art, or my newly coined term “photoodle”. Once I have taken the step away from photograph to photoodle, I might as well see what more I could do. I don’t recall why the term “round dance” popped into my head, but I decided to try some distortion effects, specifically translation to polar coordinates. Interesting.