Ice Trip

A little over a week ago I went and got myself a car wash.  I was thinking about it anyway because after a winter of salt and grime and what not my car was looking more beige than silver.  Even when it's clean it's really in-between the two.  Still, it looked really, really beige.

Then when I was getting gas the auto fill thingy didn't stop when it was supposed to and ended up dumping what I'm estimating was about a dollar fifty worth of gas (so really not that much.  Ha! Topical sarcasm!) on to the ground.  So then my car also smelled like gas.  Car wash was a must.

Part of the wash was some kind of Rain-X sealer thing at the end.  So when it snowed a few days later (of course) and then more or less immediately melted there was still water in little pools all over my car.  it ended up getting cold enough to frost overnight and it created some of the coolest, weirdest looking frost I've ever seen.

The trunk of my car all looked like this.  These were the bigger of the puddles really.  The roof and the hood of my car was covered in much smaller puddles that had some really funky frost crystals developing on and between them.

This was on the back window of my car.  I like how the tinting on the window gives the edges a light blue effect.

This is a close-up of one of the bigger puddles on the trunk.  I'm not saying, I'm just saying - that's a freaking cool picture in my opinion. One of the things I really like about all of these is that they look black and white, but really they're just white and grey on other grey.

This is on the hood of the car.  How cool is that?  It's like there were hundreds of little mohawks all over my car.

 No seriously.  I get that it's ice and by all accounts I should have just been annoyed with it (and I kind of was, I hate scraping my windows with a passion) but it just looked so freaking cool.

Come on.  Ice crystals.  Growing upward.  On my car.  Okay... so maybe that's really only enough explanation for me to be fascinated with it... That's fair.  But the point it I was fascinated by it.  

Then while I was playing around with a couple of these in Photoshop I started noticing that maybe, if I started playing around with some filters and colors, messed around with the contrast a little bit...

These could be seriously trippy.

And well... I like trippy.

So... yeah...

If you take that photo of the puddles on the trunk of the car and throw the solarize filter on it, you get this

Which kind of looks like the first frames on the screen they show when they start playing Jefferson Airplane music.

And well if you take that solarized picture and change the neutrals to bright green and then adjust the brightness and contrast...

You get the middle of the video they play while playing Jefferson Airplane music.  Or Crimson and Clover by Tommy James & the Shondells...

And if you take the window picture and mess around with the selective color and the contrast and whatnot and you get this:

Which I don't even know what it looks like but I think it looks pretty cool.  And trippy.  Which is what I was going for.

Then I started playing with one of the pictures of the hood of the car.  Started out using selective color to make the neutrals and blacks a dark green and... well... I mean... I think Fox Mulder would be interested in this.

Cause... doesn't that kind of look like it could be an alien landscape?  ... Just me?  Fine.  I'm pretty sure I think it looks like it could be an alien landscape though.

Then I just had lots of fun playing with the color on the close-up of the puddle.  To the point where I couldn't decide which one I liked best.  So I went with all of them together...

Which I just might end up printing out and putting on my wall.  Cause I likes it.

So there you go.  I hope I triggered a few acid flashbacks.  The good kind anyway.  If you start seeing bats, that's bad news.  Turn back.  Don't wait until people start turning into lizards and stuff.