Influences and thoughts behind this photograph?
When we repair broken porcelain, we like to make the repairs invisible. The Japanese do the opposite. Cracks are lined with gold, and the damage is honoured as part of the object's history. It's called Kintsugi which literally means golden repair.
Our treatment of pottery restoration makes me think of current trends in photography. On social media, there's a growing trend of over-editing portraits. Winkles, freckles and spots all gone. Skin smoothed and blurred, the sliders on Photoshop's neural filters slid to breaking point. I photograph a lot of mannequins to make them look human... others seem to photograph humans to make them look plastic. It's a disturbing trend, and the young and impressionable are fed a constant diet of unachievable perfection. Self-esteem falls, and for some the result is mental illness and self-harm.
Kintsugi is similar to another Japanese philosophy called wabi-sabi. embracing the imperfect and flawed.
Kasai shūri is my own version of Kintsugi. A broken person repaired not with gold but fire. The weld/repair still glowing red hot. We all pick up dents in life and without them we wouldn't be who we are. Celebrate them. Take strength from them, if only because you've accepted, overcome or are still working on them. Wear your scars and blemishes with pride.
For the photograph I needed to create a fire effect. For this I used a Light Painting Brushes' crystal pen with their red filter. The joints to the filter were taped with insulating tape so no light could escape, and tinfoil lined tape was also used to mask the majority of the pen's prism so light only came from the tip and was further focussed and intensified.
The subject was rim lit, an RGB panel light placed behind set on red light at 1%. Rim lighting separates the subject from the background, outlining the silhouette. The weld line was drawn with the crystal pen, lit by a Nitecore MT22c torch. The face then lit with a hooded/red gelled Sofirn SP31 v2.0 torch on its lowest setting just so the facial features were visible.
The light painting was done during a 25 second exposure. Shot at F6.3, I'd raised the camera's ISO settings to 1600 to further increase the crystal pen's brightness. Higher ISO settings make the camera more sensitive to light. The downside of higher ISO is this can introduce noise to the photograph, but the SONY A7iii camera is very good at low light photography (copes well with much higher ISO settings) and the sharpness remains.
Nerdish point. The reason the A7iii is so good with low light is the spacing of the pixels on the camera's sensor.
A perfectly symmetrical mannequin head with exquisite features then fractured and repaired with fire. That had been the picture in my head.
Embrace and take strength from your imperfections. Don't be influenced by the delusional seeking unreal and unobtainable 'perfection'. It's the flaws that make us and give us character. Embrace and take strength from them. Wear them as a badge of pride. Kasai shūri.
