I have been enthusing for some months about an aesthetic I call "neon night tunnels".
I once defined my style with the following formula:
トンネル状のスペース + 暗み + 点灯 + ボケ + = 幸せ
Tunnel shaped spaces + darkness + spotlights + Shallow depth of field = bliss
It's a style of photography that I've been using for a while that always gives me results I like. It involves urban spaces that could be described as deep or tunnel-shaped. Lots of girders and modern architecture, chrome and glass, lots of pinpoints of electric light, a blue-ish sheen to give that metallic, futuristic, 80s action movie feel, deep 3D to create a feeling of layers parallax scrolling past each other.
The student of Freud in me guesses that I find the blue-tint exciting because it is associated with the 80s action and sci-fi movies I grew up with such as Die Hard, Hard Boiled, Robocop, etc and that I love the parallax scrolling because it was prevalent in the 8-bit and 16-bit side-scrolling games of my youth. Either way, it appeals to me and I've been using it quite a bit lately, as you can see here:
Interestingly Marc Webb's new Spiderman, while not perfect, used that same aesthetic. I always thought "my look" would work well in 3D and photographically, The Amazing Spider-man did not disappoint. Here's an example:
It also gave me Proustian involuntary memory flashbacks to a Spider-man disc I had for my 'view-master'. The 'view-master' or 'stereo viewer' was an eighties toy that looked like a pair of red, plastic binoculars into which you could slide a paper disc, a little like a slideshow projector. You would look through the eye-holes and see two images fed to your brain separately and joined into one simple 3D image in much the same way as a 3D movie or 3DS today. The effect was pretty cool in the day and some of the shots, especially the final 'freeze frame' shot, in Webb's 'Amazing Spider-man' seemed to me to be digital homages to an analogue toy.
Although perhaps that's just nostalgia toying with me...
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