Shot a perfectly acceptable in-focus photo, but ended up liking the happy accident for its emotional punch.
I read Bluebeard as a child and have always had the image in mind of Bluebeard's wife frantically trying to scrub the tell-tale blood off the key to the forbidden room. I think this blurry mess of a shot captures the frenzy quite well.
A Team Sucker who kindly gave me feedback on this shot before entering commented that the slashes of metal looked like blades or swords (to my question of whether the key could be recognized in all that blur) - it's ok if that's what you see, in fact I think it's fitting, given that the fate of Bluebeard's wife was to have her head cut off.
The tale of Bluebeard is credited originally to Charles Perrault (1600's), and was included in the Grimm's first edition of 1812. Apparently the Brothers Grimm removed the tale in later editions, as it resembled two other stories that they kept - The Robber Bridegroom and Fitcher's Birds.
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"...when she looked at the little key of that awful little room at the end of the long gallery on the first floor, she saw that it was stained with blood. She wiped the key and wiped it, but the blood would not come off. She washed it, and scrubbed it with sand and freestone and brick dust, but the blood would not come off; or, if she did succeed in cleaning one side and turned the key over, there was blood on the other side, for it was a magic key which a fairy friend of Bluebeard's had given him."
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outtake:
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I love the vivid red and the flurry of motion but I can't quite make out what's going on. It makes me think of when Lady Bluebeard was trying to wipe the blood clean from the key but also of the scene where she is saved and Bluebeard himself is slaughtered. Either way, pretty awesome abstract.
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