Work With What You Have

Being at recurrent training this week does not allow me much time for blogging but I have some images I can get up this week anyhow. Before I get going I hope everyone has made it or will make it under the wire for tax day. Speaking of that how about these Tax Day Tea Party events going on across the country. Personally I think it is very healthy for an electorate to be able to protest when they feel the government is out of bounds or is not representing their values and positions. Unfortunately the press has been less than enthusiastic about the events unlike some of the other activist events that have happened in the past. Hmm... Bias anyone?

Anyhow here we go with the photo-blog. The image above was really fun to work in Elements. I was on the plane to Wichita KS yesterday and was able to work it. The image was shot a couple of weeks ago when I was getting ready to leave Maryland and head back to Michigan. The weather was absolutely yucky with fog and some light rain. I wanted to get some water shots so I jumped onto Google Maps and scoped out where there might be some locations. I matched them up in my Garmin and headed out. It was just after sunrise even though you could not tell by the photo. I had reached a gated area on the road I was on and had to turn around. Ok Google Maps missed that one. As I was driving back I remembered one of Rick Sammon's 1o rules of photography. That being to look behind you.

The structure is a boat house at the end of a small pier. The fog and mist made the image really dull and flat even after booting Clarity in ACR, so I took a different tack on the image. Going old school with a slight sepia effect would give the image more interest than just the shot from camera.

Here is the process I took and ended up with about six layers to get the effect.

• Levels adjustment layer to set the shadows and highlights
  
• Slight S-curve in Curves establish a modest contrast.
  
• Added a solid color layer of an orangish brown and set the blending mode to Overlay and brought the opacity down to give the sepia effect.
  
• My final touch was to make a vignette for the aged effect. This was done my making a selection, feathering it by 120 pixels, Inverted, and filled with black. The the opacity was dropped real low until it looked good. But is just seamed to be missing something.
  
• On a seperate layer filled with a darker brown, I applied a fiber filter to it with a strong effect. As the fibers were too tight, Transforming the layer then stretching it out so the spacing looked right did the trick. I re-cropped the original image size to remove the excess fibers (makes the file smaller). Last was to set the blending mode to Overlay and drop the opacity down to where it looked right. Let there be aged film scratching.
• A couple more layers to make the virtual frame and the image was complete.

Below is the original image and it just goes to show you that even a drab image can be made to look interesting.

Thats going to do it for me today. I'll have to see if I can get something up tomorrow night, but no promises. It depends on how beat up I get in the simulator tomorrow.

Take care...

Doug