Went to a lake for a brisk - very brisk, it was cold - walk.
View, with a few minor tweaks to polish up the image.
Same view, with a few values tweaked to make it look a washed-out twilight.
Black and white
Feels wintry, doesn't it?
When I set out to create something - whether it's a photo or a piece of writing - sometimes it takes its own course instead of following the one I had intended. It's almost as if I've poured some of my own traits into the piece of work. Namely stubbornness.
Anyway, I had intended for this image to have a specific look.
Como is a dying town. It's not quite a ghost town yet. There are still about a dozen or so people living in the town. Unfortunately, the train station I wanted to photograph was closed to public. I even tried to find a way to sneak around the fencing, with no luck.
Fortunately, there were a number of old buildings in various states of disrepair for me to photograph.
Brief recap about HDR - HDR is a compilation of 4-8 images in a succession of exposures, laid over one another to create an image that can be very true to life. It can also be manipulated to be hypersurreal.
This is an image of a building I shot at perfect exposure - 0.0.
Now, I also shot this building at -0.5, -1.0, -1.5 (underexposed) and +0.5, +1.0, +1.5 (overexposed). I used Photoshop's program to merge the images for me. As a side note for the user of PS3 - apparently, its HDR merging program isn't very good, and there are better ones out there. If this is a technique you want to seriously pursue, investigate alternatives.
Anyway, back on track. After I ran the hdr merge feature, this is one of the results I got. It's harsher, which works well for this sort of image. However, it's not really exciting.
So I tweaked various things and got this...
It's not quite hypersurreal, but it's a lot more interesting. I could've pushed this further and come out with even more bizarre results, but sometimes that's just over top and can be a turnoff. Additionally, if you look closely, it's obvious that by making these tweaks, I lost some details that really makes this building interesting, like the wavy, warped sideboards along the side and the plywood in the windows.
Looking this over, I prefer the first HDR results because I can see more potential in it, as far as photo manipulation, like making it look vintage and vignetted - much like what I did with my niece's photo. I will try find a happy medium between the two though, and see how it looks first though
Incidentally - I photoshopped behind this old ramshackle one out. See original to compare.
I'll have more pictures later.
This is my frickin' adorable niece.
Picture is ok, but the composition is kinda boring.
This is my frickin' adorable niece.
Who apparently also lived in the late 1800s.
God, I love photoshop.
"Hi!"
Finally got internet set up, and from what I hear, just in time - we might get a snowstorm. !!!!
There are times when using photoshop is good, it improves a photo. And there're times when it doesn't help.
Original, unaltered picture of an old storefront in either Kentucky or Tenn. I can't remember now.
I ran the Pseudo-HDR (Don't worry, I'll post instructions later) action, and while the image is certainly crisper, I don't love it. It lost the sun-faded look. 
What do ya'all think?
Old photo. I took this, I believe, last spring. I didn't have photoshop at the time. The original was pretty interesting but I wanted to see how it'd look with faux HDR. It came out darker than I expected, but I like it. It's pretty soothing, which isn't an image normally associated with metro or train stations.
Sometimes when you take a photo, it's a perfectly good image, but it's lacking some oomph. Joie de vivre. Pizazz. That's where photoshop comes in handy.
A dreamy kind of look.
Vintage black and white
Harsh "high-pass"
Vintage sepia
All of these are interesting for different reasons. Everyone will have different preference for different styles. So, at this point, the hard decision of choosing one photo boils down to this: What message are you trying to convey? Or emotion you want to evoke? A dreamy, tranquil one? A time-encompassing one? Harshness of war/death/whatever? Solemnity?
If I had to produce a photo for a commercial purpose, my choice would be a lot easier, depending on the product or service we're selling. But for personal sales...I probably would choose the black and white one, because it's a type of image that would work on most people's walls.
What do ya'all think?
I'm actually moving to Colorado in about two weeks. I have to be out of the door on 31st, and will be officially on road on April 1st. No joking. That means I won't have a whole lot of time to blog between now and whenever I get settled in. So I'm going to post some reruns and postdate them so that new posts will continue in the next couple weeks.
Some of these photos might seem familiar if you're a long-time reader, but I'll try to tweak them, at very minimum, so they're a little different.
Here's the original shot of Apollo that I took before moving to this house. I'd say about a year ago, roughly. If memory serves, when I posted it here, I made it look like an old pointillism comic photo.
This time around, I decided to play with a fake HDR look. A HDR photo is a fairly new rage in photography although it's been around a long time. The advent of digital cameras just made this technique a lot easier to do. The "correct" way to take a HDR photo is to shoot a preferrably static image on a tripod (as to get identical images and not have any weird ghost issues in postproduction), then shoot it again at two or three stops in both negative and positive exposures. Then after you upload the photo, you can merge them to create either very horrible pictures or absolutely jaw-dropping photos.
I don't have the time to go out and do that right now, so I decided to fake it using photoshop.
After moving - or perhaps while moving, I'll work up some bad examples to show you an example of the ghostly overlaps and hopefully a good one or two, too. I'm taking my tripod, who knows, maybe I'll see something interesting.
Oh and...what's in photo #1 that's not in #2? Hint - I did not crop anything out.
When I was in Colorado a few weeks ago, I visited a town that had a huge variety of homes. I was most interested in the Victorian-style homes and shot a few. I chose one of the pictures and ran it through the mass-spectrometer and...kidding. I played around with different features in photoshop.
Here's the near-original. I tweaked it slightly so that the picture wasn't tilted (for some reason, I almost always shoot at a slight angle). As you can see, it's a not bad picture. But it doesn't "sing" to me. It looks a bit washed out, partly because of the sky. The details to the sides of the house are a little distracting. I could crop them out, but it'd be hard to do that especially on the left side because the little house is clearly visible through the porch awning. If I cropped only on the right, the big house would be off-center, and I felt that did the photo disservice.
I ran it through a few easy steps to make the yellow pop a bit and made this photo a little more vignette. I also burned the edges of the frame a bit so that the houses to each sides weren't as obvious.
Here, I pushed the 70s feel a bit further. I like it. All it needs is a white border.
I took #2 photo, because I liked the vignetting and burning at edges effects - and wanted to keep that element in these new versions - and converted it to black and white. I think it works pretty well here.
Pushing the envelope a bit further. I deepened the contrast, making this photo a bit darker. Now the whites in this photo really pop out at you.
Why does this photo work? The trees serve to frame the big house and the balance of dark versus light helps keep your eyes centered.
What else could I do to improve this photo? If I had the time, I'd have gone back in morning when the trees' shadows wouldn't be a major player in this photo. Ultimately, I prefer the last two black and white photos, though I couldn't pick between the two - I like them both for different reasons.
What do you think? Which is your favorite and why?
I can't really put my finger on why I don't like this photo. I think it's too boring. It just doesn't sing to me. Compositionally, it's fine. I think part of it is the colors - or the lack of. Sometimes monochromatic photos work. Here, it doesn't.
When I run into photos like these, that's when I start messing with the different post production tools I have at my disposal. Get creative. Tonight, I tried converting this into a black and white, split tones, duotone, and a couple other color tools. Nothing really clicked well with me, so I turned to my cheat sheet - a list of "actions" that I downloaded off Internet.
Actions are basically short-cuts that Photoshop, Gimp and a number of other advanced photo-editing softwares have available. To reproduce the effect in the second photo, I'd have to go through about 20 or 25 different steps. That's tedious and time-consuming, never mind I'd never remember all the steps I'd need to take. So to be able to duplicate certain effects, you can either record each step as you go along and the next time you want to get the same effect, the program will run it for you. It's similar to the "macro" in MS Word. Or you can save yourself the effort and download them off the Internet.
Many people upload copies of their actions for other people to use; they are usually free to be downloaded - very handy cheat sheet if you have a compatible program.
After several trials and errors, I hit on an action that produced a photo I like a lot better than the original. It still doesn't "sing" - I still feel it's missing something. But at least it's a bit more interesting now. Click on the before and after photos to compare the large versions.
This one is processed a little. All I did was change the light/dark values to make this more "wintry." I really like the outcome. Hit the big version to see the the ice details more clearly.
Ok, just one memoir. This is not my favorite picture, composition-wise, but I needed the practice. I messed around with different settings tonight.
Looks kinda morbid, no? This reminds me of the recent Sleepy Hollow or The Brothers Grimm movies.Woot! Roommate patiently put up with Verizon for two-plus hours to get it fixed. I don't know what the problem was - haven't gotten all of the details. But it was definitely an issue on their end. I admit, I'm pretty relieved. Although I ran tests and was confident that it wasn't my computer, I still had lingering doubts. And fretted a wee bit over how much it'd cost to fix my computer's innards. Got my mom's worrying genes, it seems.
Now I can get back to jobhunting and prowling the web! And of course posting pictures.
Not too bad, but I feel like I have a gauze over my eyes when I look at this picture, especially when comparing with the following ones.
I like, but it's a bit bright over to the right. My eyes keep drifting over there, which isn't necessarily good - the focus should be on the fallen tree. I'm going to try darkening the leaves a touch later. It could use a bit cropping along the top as well.
I have mixed feelings on this one. On one hand, the picture is more balanced overall and more true to the original. And it's got a sort of vintagey, faraway almost faerie-like feel. But on the other, it's not as exciting/interesting as the lomo one above.
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