I was introduced to Gary Larson’s series of cartoons called The Far Side at about age 18, in my first full-time job, in mid-1985, working at a small screen printing company in a garage. One of my two bosses was a big fan of the one-panel comics, had books collecting them, and I was drawn in and hooked. Right up my alley, the weird, often science-based jokes were frequently populated by dumpy lab-coated professors and women in horn-rim glasses. I’ve been a fan ever since we met.
It would be the most outlandish thing in the world if such a universe could ever intersect with another unusual one of mine, that of Photos of Ground Coffee Leftovers in Mugs, a series several years old and growing sometimes by the day. But the impossible, or extremely unlikely, has happened, so I must document and describe it for you, Dear Reader.
Pareidolia, which lets one see concrete images in random places like clouds and wood knots, is another powerful force in my life, and it is this which has led me down all sorts of rabbit holes of delight. Svaneti’s OTHER life forms, made of rock, shadows, clouds, snow and ice, have revealed themselves to me and demanded that their stories be told (serialized in this very newspaper!). And, yes, things jump out at me from the bottom of my thrice-daily coffee mug, on a regular basis, and I photograph them. So perhaps the overwhelmingly unlikely was just a matter of time. That time has come, at least once.
For a while I was using one of our guest house’s chipped-edge (thus reject), slightly tulip-shaped white guest mugs as my java vessel of choice. It also became the substrate through which one of the Bespectacled Women of Mr Larson chose to reveal herself to me, and me alone (but allowing herself to be photographed like all the other leftovers, and thus to become available for anyone else to see too).
I could hardly believe my eyes. Not only was she undeniably There for the Blessed to See, but she found herself, true Far Side fashion, in the maw of some kind of Lovecraftian slug-monster! This prompted the only fitting caption of her thoughts, which I promptly added to the scene. It was PERFECT. So much so that I’m debating spray-varnishing this iconic scene to preserve it forever, and thus add it to my small collection of 3D pareidolia objects as opposed to mere photographs of the same. Before I do this, though, I’m photographing it in different ways.
Even using my iPhone 12, I have been able to get a surprisingly good, large image. This I did by shooting in RAW file format (much more tonal information than a mere jpeg), and taking four hand-held shots from exactly the same position. These I then open in Photoshop; enlarge to four times their original size; combine into a Smart Object; set its render method to Median to allow any pixel noise between the four shots to cancel itself out. Bit of a technical process, but one I use occasionally, for what are likely to be my best images, to make them huge. Then I crop, finalize the tones, and in this case am left with a 35-megapixel image. I do a solarized color version of this next (that means: invert half of the tones…), then make the original black and white and solarize THAT, for a total of three different versions. The full treatment for Herself.
I might also try to get the whole thing in sharp focus, as opposed to the above versions, which have only the bottom of the mug sharp. This would involve, tripod-mounted, a large series of otherwise identical shots, but slightly changing the focus manually for each one. These can then be combined in Photoshop in yet another one of computational photography’s sub-genres, Focus Stacking. So many possibilities.
Now all that’s left to do, perhaps, is start a new Facebook page, called Real Life Far Side, for example.
Here, members will be able to upload their own examples of actual, photographic (NOT AI, ever!) far side cartoons, either existing or (as this inaugural one is) entirely new, but in the spirit of the series. Found scenes like this one, or staged. And now that I have described this here, I have no alternative but either to 1) erase this paragraph from my article or 2) follow through with the page before anyone ELSE can beat me to it. I realize that being page moderator would include some time to allow only proper images through, and reject the rest, the spam, off-topics, the AI pretenders, and so on.
There is a choice called 3), though: let someone else take on (or not) the creation and moderation of the above Facebook page. It’s not obligatory that I do it, or even that it come into existence at all…
In any case, welcome to the occasional invasion of The Far Side into our universe, puny humans. It’s not dull or joyless to be me, I can assure you of that.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
