Art and Photography: A Common Moth... Turned Really Creepy and Surreal!

Photography, itself, is definitely a form of creativity.

And that part is not merely limited to the photograph itself, but also includes the photographer "having an eye" to spot something memorable or interesting enough to share with the world.

But it doesn't stop there.

Photo manipulation is a creative art, in and of itself. Of course, these days we have lots of digital tools to help us turn the more or less mundane into something fascinating, or beautiful, or somewhat disturbing...

This strange looking "creature" that resembles some sort of alien lifeform with multiple beings mutated inside... or is it some triangular UFO?... started off as a pretty ordinary macro photograph of one of the many moths that hang out by the back porch light.

Here's what we started with.

I'm not even sure what kind of moth this is, and a Google image search didn't even help that much... although I'm pretty sure it's some species of Hooktip.

I love experimenting with the Deep Dream Generator, so here's where the ghostly and slightly creepy transformation starts to take place... the "spirits" start to appear everywhere in the image!

A little disturbing, especially if you take a little time to just sit and study it. Which I did...

Then I thought what might be interesting, would be to "flip" the image; that is, reverse the colors. Which was a very interesting effect... now we're really dialing up the whole "alien" appearance...

At this point, it becomes a little more difficult to interpret it as a moth, or even as something from this planet.

After which, I went for a high-contrast black-and-white version, which is what you see as the main image for this post. By now we're starting to move into the whole luminous Ridley-Scott-Alien black-and-light appearance.

All in all, it was pretty fun to turn something otherwise quite ordinary into something (hopefully) far more interesting! As I have heard it said: "If you can't play with yourself, who CAN you play with?"

Thanks for looking and reading!

2019.09.12
0214