The title of this post, for those not familiar, is from the Talking Head’s 1981 song “Once in a Lifetime.” A song NPR listed as one of the 100 most important musical works of the 20th Century. A song some interpret as a commentary upon the excesses and absurdity of endless consumerism (yeah – even 39 years ago), but as David Byrne explained to NPR, it is more about how some can go through life “half-awake.”
It is similar to situations where you find yourself driving to work every day, or going through some daily routine. When you arrive or finish, you draw a complete blank on trying to recall the steps that led you there. Some refer to this as being on “autopilot.” The psychological explanation is this: The time it takes for your brain to process new information is directly correlated to how that passing of time feels. For example, that routine drive to work requires very little new information, as such time seems to “skip ahead.” The resulting question: How did I get here?
I believe Byrne was remarking how this can go so much further beyond daily incidents, but to entire spans of a lifetime. Sometimes I look back on my own body of work and second guess if I should have stayed on the same routes for so long. More recently, I believe I experienced both ends of this “alertness spectrum” while working on this particular image. There are many parallels to the 1981 release from this great band. Their move in the early 80s was a break from the latest trends.
“It had all been done, and the only thing left worth doing was some sort of urban pessimism of some kind, and that record is terribly optimistic in a way. It’s very up and, like, looking out to the world and saying, ‘What a fantastic place we live in. Let’s celebrate it.’ And I think we knew that was a fresh thought at the time.”
Brian Eno, producer, 27 Mar 2000 NPR Interview
Many planes of reality
This image actually started as an attempt to capture 49 planes of focus of a little scene in my backyard. I am in my 30-day trial of Helicon Focus, a focus-stacking piece of software, made for this purpose. Only this scene was perhaps a lot more complicated than the typical focus-stacked piece. It took me 49 exposures to cycle from the closest foreground element to the furthest background element. So I am already taking a new route to work with this one. I have never attempted this before. I seemed quite awake and aware of the moment.
It comes from a curiosity in the way a lens sees vs. our human eyes. Without a camera, I look at this little scene and see every single piece in sharp detail. With a macro lens in front of my eye, that changes. Only slices are in focus, even at f/22. When I rotate the focusing ring, elements disappear into a blur, and others reveal themselves. It’s obvious the optics of the lens are manipulating “reality” as my current eye and humanoid brain interpret it.
Therefore my initial objective – collect all these planes and assemble them together. While I am still a complete beginner in playing with it, I found the tools within it completely fascinating. And I believe I threw a pretty hard task at it with this relatively busy scene with A LOT of elements.
It allows you to explore these 49 planes of focus in a variety of ways depending on the subject matter. As it turns out, I have a lot of overlapping elements, and you are assembling them into a 2D space. Ultimately, some overlapping elements get priority over all of the others. This was a lot more time consuming than I realized.
A macro “grand scenic”
I ended up with a single image assembled from these 49, a new starting image with everything in focus. It looked pretty much the way I initially set out for it to look. I started developing it the way I normally would with a macro photograph, somewhat on “autopilot” now. In Photoshop, I adjusted some tonality, threw in some luminosity masks, played around with warm vs. cool details.
The resulting photograph, while satisfying as a technical accomplishment, still felt empty. I had this somewhat interesting, highly detailed, sharp throughout, picture of some weeds in my yard. For all the time I put into one image, I desperately wanted it to work, and trying to be objectively self-critical, it just wasn’t working. It seems during development, my vision became less and less satisfying. Whenever I arrive at this point, it is time to take a break and put it down for a while.
Time to wander
When I get stuck on where to go next with images like this, I just start playing with no particular direction in mind. “Freewheeling it” if you will. You try things until you find something that “sticks.” Each step along the way, you do a gut check. Does this step feel like I am going forward or not? Going fully abstract seemed to stick, and just I ran with it. More often than not, when I go in a dramatically different direction, I end up running, not walking, back those steps in disgust.
Once I started to go abstract, a “plane of reality” I hadn’t initially thought of, I basically abandoned any thoughts of where I thought I was going. I just let go of any constraints in those initial objectives.
By the time I felt this particular work was “ready to abandon” and call it done, I sat back a bit puzzled and thought – “well, how did I get here?!” – and the Talking Heads song phrase immediately came to mind. It was a dramatic turn from my original intent, and yet, much more deeply satisfying as a result.
Maybe a new route to work?
Honestly, I don’t know if I just let one part of my brain take over and let the other sleep for a while, or I was on autopilot or a rejection of it. Nobody would even know, or care for that matter, that the final image originally started as some 49-image focal stack. But I have no doubt it contributed to some vital ways of getting to the final piece. Just like the lens reveals small planes of focus in a close-up scene, maybe my mind yearned for another plane that the focus ring just couldn’t reveal.
Like the direction the Talking Heads took on their album back in 1981, I certainly broke away from previous dogma on this one. I may not know exactly how I got here, but I kinda like where this may be headed. Now, where did I put that map?
I’m doing some catching up so I apologize for a very late comment. I found this all very interesting. The way you describe what happens with human eyes vs. what happens with a camera lens is great – I think it’s the best I’ve seen. Succinct and clear. And the description of the process you went through with this photo hits home again and again. Even so, I need to be reminded about being on autopilot, and taking chances. So thank you for that, and I love the image!
No worries. I welcome reigniting any posts with fresh comments, so thank you ! 🙂
It can be hard to get out of autopilot sometimes.
That song is so apropos. As to the image, I absolutely love it. I suspect the steps that led to it are exactly what helped you switch to R brain, which is nonverbal and timeless. I do my best work, I think, when I’ve gotten frustrated, am ready to paint it all out, and so become non verbal and just let my brush go.
That’s definitely how it felt here, I just “let the brush go” in a sense. Thanks Melissa!
Talking Heads, wow that takes me back. To say the song was about consumerism would be stretching it a bit. I recall David Byrne once said he was fascinated by the middle class because it seemed so different and so distant from his life, and that he could not imagine living like that. At the time there was a lot of speculation at that statement and I now wonder what social media would have made of it had Twitter or FB been around then. I always thought he was simply talking about going through life asleep rather than consciously and purposefully, and Byrne, I believe, tended to see the middle class as being the most “asleep”. In any case, he’s an interesting artist. I would like to think that Byrne would see your experience in the creation of this lovely picture, as the most awake anyone can be 🙂
That’s interesting Cedric. I kinda figured you’d give me a homework assignment. I’ll have to see if I can research those comments on the middle class.
This article talks about that quote and adds some interesting commentary on what the song means: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/talking-heads/once-in-a-lifetime
Thanks. That also references the middle-class remark, but I can’t haven’t found yet something that would allude to him coming from some wealthy family. No doubt he accumulated some from the band’s success, but his early life doesn’t reveal much.
At least that is what I would infer from someone saying “I can’t imagine living like that.” That quote could be out of context though – it may have been referring to the evangelicals he was pulling words from?
My take on it was that he never implied that he was wealthier in terms of money. At least he never struck me like that in the interviews I used to read about him and the band. I think he thought of the middle class as those people who lived in their comfort zone as automatons, sleeping through their lives creating nothing but artless, repetitive routines.
I think his life and his achievements are worth looking into. Over the years I found him to have an interesting perspective on life.
I have a post that I’ve had in draft for some time now which starts with an Anthony de Mello quote and which I think fits rather well with Byrnes sentiment (at least as I perceive it): “Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.” Maybe those people are Byrne’s middle class. I suspect the life he couldn’t imagine living was living life asleep.
But hey, that’s just my interpretation, if you come up with a different take, I will be most interested to hear it.
Mark you’re making perfect sense in your explorations. Probably because the Talking Heads asked you to Stop Making Sense. Does that make sense?
You are quite clever Mr. Grill.
🙂
And a cool image, by the way.
And thanks to you, I have that magazine to draw inspiration from!
Appreciate it! Glad you liked the magazine. Not easy growing a YouTube channel from scratch. Will see what happens 🙂
Maybe you need to get Taylor Swift give you a mention? 🙂
Good idea. I’ll give her a ring tonight. Maybe Brooks will give me a shout too ?
Well, however you got there, Mark, it was well worth the journey in my opinion. The image appeals to me, partially because I’ve always loved the orange/blue contrasting color combination, but also there is something almost haunting about it I can’t quite put my finger on. On the technical side, how long did it take to resolve the 49 different focus images/layers with Helicon?
Thanks Earl. Quite the journey indeed.
I didn’t time the stack in Helicon, but it wasn’t that bad at all. Maybe 1-2 minutes if that? And these are all D810 36 MP images. If I would have tried opening all 49 in Photoshop, I think my 12 year old Mac would literally bust out laughing at me. So I found it quite amazing how Helicon was able to handle that on an old computer. My 28 GB RAM was showing maxed out for awhile – but again, not bad at all.
I’ve never looked at Helicon as I haven’t done much with multiple focus planes but I’d never have guessed resolving 49 images would take only a couple of minutes. Excellent!
It turned out wonderfully! The Helicon Focus video was really neat! I felt like a kid watching it twist and turn rendering your backyard scene 3D. And I enjoyed the thoughts you shared alosngside your work as well. Thank you as always for putting such care into your work and the world around you.
Your kind words are very much appreciated Susanne.