Arrivals And Departures2 min read time

“It is a word. Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.”
―Elodin, The Name of the Wind

I’ve come to think the name of an image has as much meaning as the image itself to the story it tells. The above quote from Master Namer, Elodin from author, Patrick Rothfus’ Kingkiller series seemed to hit the nail on the head of this concept quite well.

When I was in Chicago during 2019 I saw Marina City for the first time and this was my view out of the hotel room. You can see a small sliver from the roof of The House Of Blues in the bottom right. Which is where I went for dinner after a day of cars, planes and my first Uber ride.

Through some Photoshop and Topaz Labs alchemy, I did my best to take it a step further and turn it into a Sci-Fi scene; borrowing from an image of a ship I made from my Lightroom library. Both scenes include increasing the canvas size, duplicating the original image and then a crop on top and bottom. For the Arrivals image I flipped the whole image vertically too. The angles seem more inviting with the image flipped so that one was called Arrivals

I also like images with no titles or names, as it adds to the mystery, but I lean towards providing, and looking for them most of the time.