photo by Jon Wiederhorn
For most of his weekly HeadbangersBlog.com photo posts, Slipknot percussionist Shawn Crahan (a.k.a. Clown) has sent us single-frame images that have been warped and manipulated either in the developing stage or in post-production. This week, however, he sent us a composite of images of fellow percussionist Chris Fehn, which was created using a digital camera's preset mode. By gauging where each of 16 equally sized frames would wind up in the image, Crahan employed mathematics, creativity and luck to create this week's striking image. Click "more" to see the picture and read Crahan's comments.
I used to own a camera called a Nikon Cool Pix 950, and like a lot of digital cameras, you can ask it to take a single image, or one every second. And this particular camera had a preset for taking 16 photos starting in the left hand corner. So if you look at this picture, the first frame is up in the left hand corner, then it goes to the right, then drops down and starts over to the left and zigzags like that until the last image. I was really trying to figure out how I could use all 16 images to put his face in his face, and I decided it was really all a matter of timing it right.
So, I got several individual ones, then I ran up close to him and got those pictures of his hair and I zoomed in and out on him, running closer, moving back, all to try to make this thing and create something from nothing. And the subject is Chris Fehn wearing one of the masks we had made of our faces, and they're very disturbing because they're motionless. There's no breathing or movement. They're death masks.
I did this photo as an experiment to take something that's preset and trying to develop something else out of it. The machine is real mathematical. It''ll take 16 pictures and make one photo. And I'm all for going against the programming because when you add the organic to the machine you get happy accidents. And this is me looking for the happy accident, putting the human behind the programming and trying to rework the formula.
And that is something we should all be doing in this world because if we continually revise something that hasn't been working and trying to make it better, it might not be as beneficial as completely destroying what was made. Sometimes, completely destroying what is can get you closer to what needs to be. And that's a big problem with where the world's at right now.
We think we're so smart. We got it all figured out and we have all these laws and all these rules, and all these goals that we want to work through. But if anybody hasn't figured it out yet, we're not meeting any of our expectations. We're not really figuring anything out. We can say that there's a hole in the layer around the earth and the polar icecaps are melting, but are we really all doing anything about it? Maybe we need to against what we know and what we think in order to solve the problem.
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