Digital Art

Yesterday afternoon Evelyn and I took a ride on the Harley and ended up in South Haven MI. We had been there before but I never had taken my camera (or at least one that is capable of spectacular shots) before. we walked around for a while and finally stopped at a little place tucked by the docks called York's  Landing. Had a great burger and fry's and it was time to head back home. Got a number of snaps. Sorry you read enough U.K. photo magazines and it becomes part of your lexicon. The one that stood out though was this one form the entrance to York's Landing. It looks like a street but in reality there is no traffic there and is lighted so as to be one big dance floor at night.

The shot was take with a EF 16-35 f2.8L USM lens mounted to the 40D. ISO was at 100 with exposure at 1/200th second at f/10.0. The lens was all the way in at 16 MM. I focused on the wine sales sign then framed and exposed for the sky knowing I could recover some of the shadow in Photoshop. You do what you cotta do when you forget to put the circular polarizer on the lens. Oh well!

When I got the images into Lightroom and started looking at them, this one clearly had the most potential for digital play land. I started playing around with some of the sliders and remembered a piece that Matt Kloskowski did on one of his Lightroom Killer Tips blog a while back that was very unique. What I came up with pretty much using the sliders as shown below (you can do the same thing in Adobe Camera Raw) is the image below.

[Lightroom Product]

Lightroom is such a cool program because you can literally get most of your work done there and print or send off to the lab/blog or what ever. Anyhow I thought this might look good as an oil so I made a virtual copy and went to PS. I have Alien Skin Snap Art that has some really cool filters. One of which is oil painting. Playing around with that filter did not give me the love I was hoping for as it blurred out the image too much. Ok... taking it back to PS just changes the layer. I took the original layer, placed it on top and dropped the opacity to 23% which stepped up the edges some what.

Alien Skin Snap Art also has this crinkled paper look so I thought I would try it. It was really sweet because it gave an interesting edge effect. The final result is the image below.

Later this morning our Tom is coming home from summer work in TN so the old blog may be sporadic again this week but I will see what I can get up.

That's it for now, take care... Doug