Shuttered Speed - Photographic Portraits presented as a median result

Blue light unsettles. It is something phone manufacturers try to reduce so that when you're doom scrolling a feed of insignificant things, searching for meaning and connection, it is one of the eleven million pieces of information your forward thinking brain ignores, but your sub conscious brain gets something from. Sometimes that eerie, disquieting, foreign feeling of the void sneaks in.

Blue light, in intense forms is rare in the natural world, in spite of the great big blue hemisphere we see when there's no clouds in the sky, so why on top of why does it give such apparent disquieting and uncomfortable renderings of the human form?

I don't know, but I hope you'll notice the way it changes the way the musculature of the face sits, the way it highlights the transition from natural, fatty deposits that round our features and protect our bodies from harm, and how, at the right angles, with some light-flags (black cloth) - it creates a typical Retmbrand style of lighting, even though here I've used three globes.

These portraits were shot at various shutter speeds, but I settled at 1/8000 seconds for most of them, the highest shutter speed my camera can do, to try and claw down the shortest sliver of reality I can, so that when I use Photoshop's median feature on the images, I hope to illustrate that the stability of our observation is merely one of comprimise, because if one moment stitched itself together with the other, all we would see is a temporal mess, a mass of wraith like figures in the ever changing mist of environment, which, it too, would be indistinct and fractured.

This is the sort of image I like to produce aside my other content, but stylistically, it is so very different to my painterly portraits. This is instead of a study of light, time, and how the two are so tightly linked with the physical properties of the universe, and the way in which our fleshy brains observe all that be.

First, the image below is a median (ie, the middle image of all the images thereafter) - which I see as a single, stand alone image, and it is indeed, of course, comprised of all the moments that were captured before and prior, but when laid atop one another and massaged into the middle, represents reality as a strange, ephemeral, ethereal, unknown void, full of unease and discomfort.

All the images that follow are in the image above. They're the deterministic components of an image that appears to not be deterministic at all. My friend Erin (the subject) will use them as references in a self portrait that she is going to paint. As for me, I used them to create the above image as a single stand alone piece.

The images that follow are entirely unedited, raw from camera. The point was to make lighting be uncomfortable.

And the lighting set up, as seen through my phone, in my garage:

I drive the car out, I bring the human in, and I create.

Thanks for taking a look :)