FACE IN THE FIRE

Apropos of nothing very much in particular, and because nobody really asked, I thought I might like to explain an image I used on the blog I published on Bonfire night a few weeks ago. Why I thought this is anybody’s guess, of course, but then, because nobody is actually guessing, I thought perhaps that I might just do it anyway for no other reason than there’s nothing else on my mind today and I might as well write about something, if only to amuse myself.

Anyway, in order to illustrate my less-than-unique observations on that particular matter, on that particular date, I felt the need to use an image of a sheet of flame which, unfortunately, was something sadly lacking in the vast electronic storehouse of my own photographic ineptitudes. There was an image or two that I had taken with my old SLR film camera on one long forgotten sombre morning of November the sixth many, many years ago as I strolled mournfully across a field that had held a public firework night event the previous evening, but they somehow didn’t seem to fit the bill. A large black circle of smoking debris just didn’t really seem to be quite what was needed, and I would have had to track down the old album and scan the print and, really, who can be faffed with doing that at that time of the morning…?

Oh yes, more committed, more determined people with the urge to succeed.

I forget sometimes.

Now where was I…? Oh yes, trying to find an image of a sheet of flame…

There is, in the dark and sinister photo retouching world that we call Photoshop, a filter that can provide a pretty convincing fire or flame effect, but somehow that really didn’t seem to satisfy my needs either as it was slightly too “artificial” and, because I was unlikely to be attending any kind of bonfire night event myself, I instead instigated that most feeble and shallow of fallback positions for the middle-aged designer in search of reference material and did a Google Image search (other search engines are available...) and, to the horror of pretty much every professional image maker out there, I blagged an image off the internet.

“I’ll have the huge copyright-infringement guilt trip later, if you don’t mind” I thought, as a wave of self-justification that I wasn’t going to use the image directly but merely use it as source material for another image washed over me and purged me of all those dark thoughts.

Anyway, as images went it didn’t really fit the bill either, but I thought a tiny part of it might and it was the first one that I could find with sufficient image resolution for my needs. Anyway, for whatever wicked and indefensible reasons, blag it I did and I began my evil manipulations…

To be honest, I didn’t intend anything fancy, just a quick left to right flipover and image combination to give a symmetrical image that I could then crop an area out of to make a rectangle of flame to illustrate my point for Guy Fawkes night.

This I duly did and then I noticed something really strange. I did find the overall shape of the combined image rather pleasing in a kind of sub-Quatermass “face of the demon” kind of a way, but as I looked into the middle of the image, in that very human way we have of finding familiar shapes in the light and shade of random objects because our brains are hard-wired into doing such things, because those images are the most familiar to us, my mind saw a shape in the flames. Actually, not so much a shape… more like a face…

Now, at this point you must remember that I have literally done nothing at all to this image other than flip a copy of it and overlay it over the original. No other image manipulation has been done, and yet there, in the heart of the fire, there appears to be the image of a man’s head with hair and a beard and a ruffled collar looking, to all intents and purposes, like someone from the very era in which Guy Fawkes lived and died.

I have wondered since whether if you manipulate all images of flames in a similar way, you will always spot some kind of a face which did lead me to then wonder whether the spirit of Guy Fawkes does actually inhabit all bonfires, although, whilst I don’t really believe in such things, it did give me pause for thought, and, considering what I intended to use the image to illustrate, it is one heck of a coincidence, don’t you think…?