Experimenting With Aesthetics

After looking at some artists who have made their work using online streaming CCTV cameras, I found myself liking the aesthetic - with the grubby screens, scratched, weathered and low-res.  It makes their images easier to identify with a definite sense of surveillance, whilst I have adopted a more 'street' perspective - surveillance nonetheless, there is a feel to the work of Gaia Light, for example, that has more sinister connotations.  I think some of my images shot through car windows have a similar effect. 

I do like the edits that I have roughly put together here, and I will consider this an option moving forward as I continue to develop my work.

​In photoshop, I used the gaussian lens blur tool with a small radius of about 4px just to obscure the focus, I then added a 'dirty' texture using the overlay blending mode with around 66% opacity and finally added a vignette edge to help centralise and frame the image.  I applied this same edit to a small number of my photos as shown above to see if it change the way of viewing and meaning.  The result of which is - I quite like the aesthetic - it does seem to add a more obvious direction of surveillance to my images.  Moving forward, I will experiment with different ways of pursuing this line of enquiry to achieve a more natural visual that has the same feel as this.