Incongruous: Mathmap?

My first digital assignment as part of my commercial photography course has just been unveiled. The brief involves creating a composite image of a studio lit and location elements to create an image that addresses the thematic brief: 'incongruous' Roughly translated into layman's terms this involves creating an image with elements some of which seem out of place or inharmonious in the scene. This does not mean that the photo editing need stick out like a photoshop disaster.

In fact it means quite the opposite, the digital editing should be of a quality that the incongruent features of the image are part of the images intended message rather than its apparent construction alone.

Our course leader and commercial photographer Paul Wenham-Clarke threw the doors wide open on scope for this project, encouraging research into surrealist artists such as Rene Magritte and Escher.

Following this line I immediately thought of some of my previous experiments with droste style image manipulation via free image editing software The Gimp and Mathmap plugin. This coupled with the droste code developed by surrealist photographer and Flickr legend Josh Sommers allows a photographer to drastically alter images into mind bending illusions that are definitely incongruous. I thought this would make a great start to my research and though i may as well share with you how the process is achieved. Josh has an excellent tutorial for using this software HERE.

Basically the program defines and manipulates the position of the pixels within images based on mathematical formulae (much in the same way photoshop does behind the scenes). Certain formulae such as the one linked above allow the user to create images with 'infinite' polar distortions as shown in my own attempts above and below. I thoroughly recommend trying out these techniques, although they look complicated and the programming is a little outside the Photoshop norm, it is still a unique editing technique that is defiantly worth considering.