New Twist on Body Art

Traditionally when one thinks of body art, the thought of a tattooed body comes to mind. Another possibility might be piercings or body painting. Here is another take on using the human body for art, in this case a more abstract art. Take a look.

I had take some picture of a soon to be mom for a baby bump session and was thinking of how could be used as a piece of art rather than just a picture of her bump. This particular shot started out with a tight T-shirt that gave a smooth line for a nice back lit image.

It started out with a single black and white yin-yang type of image. I was going down the line shadowing road when I changed direction and came up with this gradation of grays.

Nothing like art that has special meaning.

Take care... Doug

The Verdict Please

AFTER

BEFORE

I have blogged about this picture before and you can read the story about City Falls right here. Then why am I going over it again. Well I have had many comments about this image on how it must be an illustration, It doesn't look real, or it's a great HDR.

Yes the after image has been cropped, adjusted in Lightroom, sent to Photoshop for some adjustments and then back to Lightroom. No smoke and mirrors, just basic post production. The before image is the RAW file straight out of the camera.

I said yesterday that they are going to be short this week so that will wrap it up for today.

Take care... Doug


For more information of our photography, visit us at peekfoto.

Chip Off The Old Blog

Years and years ago I had a computer... actually it was my first laptop. It was a Tandy computer that I purchased in Wichita KS while I was going through aircraft recurrent in a Learjet model 25. Well as computers go, the world passes them buy and life seems to grind to a painful dribble when running programs. The solution has always been, yep... Get a newer, faster, and better computer.

So what do you do with the old boat anchor. Toss it in the trash? No, that hurts too much. 

 

This after all was my first laptop. The tinkerer that I am got the best of me and I had to open the hood and see what was underneath. Besides I had decided to give the carcass to one of my boys to use a he was in his secret squirrel period. The problem was the weight. It would take all he had to lug the thing around. So in the diet, I ended up with the chip shown above. The cover is simple soldered to the top of the chip so that came off really easy to expose the processor. 

So it ended up in the studio for some macro work. What you see above was using a 50mm 1.4 prime with a macro filter screwed onto the front. I will eventually end up with a dedicated macro lens but am waiting for the right time.

From the studio to the CF card, the iMac, over to the MacBook Pro and finally into Lightroom in my hotel room. Onto some artistic renditions of this little jewel. Here is what I came up with.

Yes this was all done in Lightroom using the localized adjustment brush, Color always has a way to better delineate parts of a larger pard. It kind of reminds me of the aircraft engines in college that were cut-away and then the various parts were painted to represent the different aspects of the propulsion process. 

The yellow circle shows the brush tool while the little dots on the image represent each adjustment. It is always fun to play with objects to recreate them in a different light.... Uh, maybe a different color.

Have a good day and tomorrow I thing I will have a hard drive to look at. Ooooo, how exciting. Well it was for me anyhow.

Cya... Doug


For more information of our photography, visit us at peekfoto.

Abracadabra

I have been busy doing many other things and have really not had much time to spend in Photoshop being creative or revisit old skills and work on some new ones. The image below is the final image and was a photo of a train at the railroad museum in Wichita KS that I took last fall.

Ok, its a train. The object of the exercise was to do something with it in Photoshop. The fact that the front of the train looked so bad because the forward door was open and had no intension to be closed. The day was a dreary cold day and the sky was grey and ugly. Here is what I started with.

A number of things had to be done to recreate the door in the closed position. Colors and shades for the different angles, copy and flip the lights, rebuild the flat on the door, lettering, and ultimately the rail and chain shadows had to be put in. Here is a close up of the before and after.

In all, the tools used to recreate this were the Pen tool for vector selections, Lasso, Polygonal Lasso, Clone Stamp, Free Transform, Brush, Eraser, Gradient, Line, and maximum use of layers. I did use some really cool clouds brushes to create the sky background. It is interesting how when working with an image you can get myopic in your work. Trying to get every pixel just right when no one is really going to see the difference. It is this attention to detail that not only causes late night work, stiff muscles from sitting in one position too long, and produces really good images.

I started out this post with the intention of providing a review of one of the onOne products and will pass on that but here is the image.

It is the FocalPoint 2 Photoshop Plug-In form onOne that created the blurring effect. Yes I have a Lensbaby but when you don't have all your gear with you, the software is a nice tool. Here is a close-up of how the Plug-In works.

I is similar to the U-Point technology that Nik Software pioneered a couple of years ago. The four white dot handles control the shape of the effect, The left open circle handle controls the vignette of the blur and the right one controls the intensity of the blur. Very quick for a down- and dirty tool.

Ok, that is probably enough of the train picture. I'll Cya tomorrow... Doug


For more information on our photography, visit us at peekfoto.

Wired for... for What?

This image was take while waiting for a ride to the Fixed Base Operator in Fl Lauderdale Fl last Saturday. It was a nice sunny day yet if I were to turn 90 degrees to the left I would be looking and an ominously dark sky that was about to bust open with rain.

Anyhow, the structure for the waiting area drew my attention. These loose wires on the structure looked like they were waiting to be adjusted or to eventually support some kind of walk covering. Upon closer inspection, these are not cables, wires or anything like that. They are steel rod that are already set in place to make the structure look like it is not finished. This is South Florida I thought to myself. So now it must fall into the realm of art. Which is truly in the eye of the beholder.

I am up for a good day of grouting so we will cya tomorrow... Doug

Different Mosaic Effect

We had a long day running up from New Orleans along a line of thunderstorms to Louisville and finally onto Nashville where I am right now. With not much time to post and a NFL pre-season game on the HDTV in the room, I needed some no-brainer play time.

So here it is. Below is one of the images I have previously posted and have been wanting to try a mosaic effect on an image. Yes I could simply apply a filter and I would have a Photoshop mosaic. That's not what I wanted thought.

From the image above, I completed the following process to make the mosaic below:

1. 28 selections copied to their own layer (Cmd-J).
2. Transform each of layers to give a slight rotation.
3. Apply a good size stroke (10 point worked in this case as I am working on a smaller jpeg).
4. Flatted the 28 layers to one layer. If you want to keep the original layers intact simply turn on the layers you want to flatten, go to the top of the stack and press Cmd-Option-Shift-E (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E on the PC). This will create a separate but flattened layer of the layers you had turned on.
5. I decided to apply a levels correction at this point as the shadows where a little deep for the mosaic effect.
6. Made a black background.
7. Used the background eraser tool to remove the large stroke in step 3.
8. Made a selection of the mosaic layer and expanded the selection by one pixel.
9. Deleting at this point will remove the feathering of the background eraser.
10. Reselected the mosaic and applied a smaller (2 pixel) gray stroke on a separate layer.

There you have it, ten steps to an interesting mosaic of any image you want. One thing I would recommend is to use an image that does not have a large area of similar color like the sky in this example. This if think would result in better mosaic.

Take care all... Doug

Mo-Pix

A couple more images of the cars around my hotel over the weekend. The paint quality on these baby's is unreal. It is almost like you could put your hand right through the metal. I really don't think that is possible though. But the look was really cool.

Some of the pin striping and flames were so precise. The guys that lay these lines down must have been surgeons in a different life. Now wavering. No Blotching. Just smooth clean lines. Amazing!

I am in Illinois visiting family for a couple days so I am going to cut this just a little short and get going with the fam.

Cya... Doug 

Cars-Cars-Cars

Friday night we were driving into the hotel from a day of think-tanking and on the drive from the main road were hundreds of people sitting in folding chairs just watching cars go by. The first thought was we may have entered a parade route. We started to get some idea of what was happening as we were seeing older classic cars in some of the parking lots.

Sure enough, 6000 classic cars were in town for the Columbus Goodguys PPG Nationals classic car show. I gotta tell ya, this would not be a cheap hobby. It was evident there was plenty of sweat put into these steeds. I am not a "car guy" per se but I can certainly appreciate exceptional workmanship when I see it.

These are all shot with a Canon 5D MkII with an EF 24-105 f/4 L lens. For some reason I find myself gravitating to specific parts of the car. Some times blowing the background out with a tight focal length and other just to bring attention to a specific part. All of them have been cropped from their original for artistic purposes. Maybe its the non-car guy in me but the attraction to the beauty and art of focused attention.

This one above shows some of the most painstaking detail I have ever seen in a paint job. I dare say I am in some linguistic violation to even refer to it as a "paint job"

Anyhow, I have these and a bunch more that I have not had time to process but hope to have a few more up tomorrow.

That will wrap it op for today.

Cya... Doug

Lines of a Sunset

This image was from last Saturday evening. Evelyn and I drove up to Grand Haven for a sunset and of course I had to bring my gear. Come on, how could I pass up a sunset shot. I did not have a long-shot of the pier at sunset and being June I thought I could get the sun right behind the lighthouse for a unique effect.

We paid the state the $6 to get into the parking lot and drove well south in the lot and set up camp to wait for the setting sun. Little did I realize I would have to contend with a couple hundred sea gulls. As the sun began to set I had to relocate three times as the sun was setting way north. I finally realized the sun would be going behind some clouds and I would not be getting the shot I came for but that is what happens and you just roll with it.

Not only did the sun misbehave, the sky was very hazy making life more difficult. Shot with a Canon 40D with an EF 24-105 f/4 L IS lens with photo specs of f/4 aperture, 1/8000 (that's right) shutter speed. The sun was still rather bright and in order to keep the blow-out and wild lens flare (which is mildly evident anyhow) to a minimum, I had to go for long focal length and high shutter speed.

So what is with the wild lines in the sky. That is a posterizing effect in Photoshop. Now for the why I chose to employ that effect. The sun did a wonderful job at what the sun does when you shoot into it. There was some natural lines of gradation that just didn't look that great. I am on the road with this image and retrieved the image as a dng and it opened in 8 bit which just does not have the data that 16 bit provides. So rather than live with the gradation. I went a little more artsy. Simple as it sounds, it is what it is.

It is getting late and I have to br bright eyes and bushy tailed in the morning.

Cya, and take care... Doug 

Rings Just for fun

I don't know, I must have been in a weird art mode last week but this image is another I took at the Virginia Aviation Museum. It was a shot from the back of a Pratt & Whitney J58 which powered the stealthy and very high speed SR-71 Black Bird. The rings are the afterburner section that is used to distribute the fuel and exhaust gasses to get the extra propulsion for that engine.

I am back in the office working on the desk. Hopefully I will have the surface mounted by the end of the day. Photos to follow.

Take care... Doug

Aero Art

I know… What is it? 

Surely you should be able to guess. It is seven rotor stages of an axial flow compressor section for a jet engine.

So what is that?

Answer: Each one of the colored blades are in reality little airfoils or wings. As they are rotated they air across opposite airfoils that do not rotate and comprise the stator stages and are not shown. At the end of compression fuel is introduced, combusted (like a blow torch) and the hot gases exhaust across a number of turbine stages that look similar to the compressor section. This section is in turn connected by a shaft to the compressor section to keep the compressed air coming. Finally the exhaust leaves the engine as thrust. As the air flows along the longitudinal axis (front to back) rather than around the rotating axis like a turbocharger, it is classified as an axial flow compressor.

The real short answer: It is a totally rad supercharger.

The original image was taken at the Virginia Aviation Museum of a sectioned engine display. The fun part photographically was working with the image in Photoshop. I was working on it last night in Richmond VA knowing I had to get up early this morning to catch a flight to Little Rock AR but once I got into it… Well you know what happened there… Tonight Show, Late Night… It wasn’t mush after that when I hit the pillow.

The process was pretty basic but time consuming. A the lighting was not that good at capture, I had to hand hold with the aperture out to f/2.8 which is in no way favorable for a long field of focus. This basically took the magic wand and quick selection tool and trashed them because they were very confused. The most exact selection I could do was employ the Polygonal Lasso Tool and feather the selection one pixel.

So I ended up with seven layers each with one stage of compression. The problem with extracting a section and then turning the layer back on is there is that little selection line (from the feathering) that is present. After each selection, I turned the extracted layer back on, Made the original layer active and cloned in over the feathering line. Brainless activity late at night.

Finally I made a color adjustment layer and applied it to the specific layer beneath it and changed the blend mode of the adjustment layer to Color. This allowed the shape, and shadows of the blade to come through. Overlay just did not do the job right, but as often the case, youu flip through the blending modes until it looks right.

There you have it. Take care and enjoy a nice weekend.

Cya… Doug

Inspiration and Creativity

A week or so ago I had a post called Left Brain Right Brain. In that post I talked about how the brain has different functions for creative and analytical behavior. This post is going to go one step further down the creative avenue. Creativity is the result of the imagination of ideas either original or from someone else. An idea or thought in and of itself is not necessarily creative. It is what you do with that information that makes it a creative thought.

So where do these thoughts come from? Sometimes the just come out of the blue, other times they are an amalgamation of random thoughts floating around in our head. Either way, by amassing these thoughts is a common theme, we become creative. That works in art. In science that same statement might look like this. We theorize by structuring and examining prior proofs with ordered thought to produce a viable and cognitive result or solution.

Yuck! I like the artsy expression better. But really what are we talking about here? Where do those ideas come from that we become creative with. Short of pulling a rabbit out of our hat with every creative moment we have there is a more simple answer.

The word inspire came from a Latin usage of the words inspirare or to breath or blow into. Used in reference of a divine or supernatural being imparting a truth or idea to someone. Christians believe that God himself inspired the authors of the Holy Bible in its original text.

Today inspiration takes on new meanings. Some say it is different for everyone, others just say they know when they have been inspired. Effecting some form of cerebral/emotional feeling of fulfillment. This is where we have to narrow the inspirational topic. People can get, or be inspired for different purposes or by other people, "He inspired his class to..."

Let's focus (pardon the pun) on inspirational photography. We often see soemething that inspires a thought. We don't necessarily need to immediately act on that thought but it does end up as one of those random thoughts in our mind. I don't believe there is any one event that inspires our photographic moments. I do feel there is a common thread that inspires each person in any realm of creativity. 

Some samples of inspiration in photography may be appropriate at this point.

• Landscape - When you come upon a view of this earth that is so spectacular, you just have to stop, set up, and take way too many images of the same scene.
• Nature - Seeing an eagle in flight, a bear grabbing salmon, the stare of a lion. These majestic animals inspire the nature photographer to capture unbelievable images for the pleasure of the masses.
• Portrait - When the light is exactly right, not by the rules of lighting or posing, but when it is "right". That emotional moment when the photographer just knows this is a most excellent opportunity.
• Wedding - When a moment can not be recreated and all the aspects of the moment you are in are perfect to capture a perfect memory for the couple you are photographing. It is this expectation of these moments that inspires the wedding photographer.
  
• Fine Art - What is the difference between fine art and pornography. Some may say nothing while others say it is the motivation. While we do not explore the area of nude art, we understand the appreciation of the artist/photographer that is inspired by the curves of the human figure.
  
• Journalistic - Similar to the wedding photographer, it is the non-recurring moment that can inspire him or her to endure the hardship they so often encounter.
  
• Architecture - Here it is again about light and shape. Inspiration to one who is drawn to architecture can come from the realization of what man has assembled with concrete and iron. 
  

So what is it that inspires a photographer. If you look at the highlighted words above, there is one common thread that runs through all the types of photography listed. It is not a tangible thought or process that spurs that moment of inspiration but an essence beyond what we can comprehend. Something our creator has provided for our enjoyment.

My bottom line assessment on the inspirational photographic moment is when God presents himself to our eyes that others do not see. That moment when you know you must stop and capture the moment to share with others.

Hey, I have carried on long enough so its time to get out-a-here!

Cya... Doug

A Warhol Moment

A couple of weeks ago I was doodling around with photoshop and remembered I wanted to recreate an effect I had seen at some other point in time. I was an effect that Andy Warhol would use on some of his portraiture work.

With an illustrators background, Warhol was not exactly accepted as an "artist" by the traditional art community. He would have these hard edge, high contrasty images that looked almost mechanical. Something that was so simple in its presentation but many times complex in its content. Further demonstrating the dichotomy of Warhol himself. 

Painter, Photographer, Producer, Director, Musician, Actor, and the list goes on. It does not matter if you liked the man or not, agreed with his positions or not, Warhol was definitely a uniquely weird and bizarre individual. Leaving a permanent mark in the arts.

Hey... Hope you are having a great Christmas Eve and looking forward to a special Christmas day tomorrow.

Cya... Doug

It's Friday... Must mean Snow

We are getting a good bit of snow for this early in December. The snow has come and gone and now is coming again. Hope it makes it's mind up so we can get on with the cold weather and not have to deal with the slush and ice so much.

Moving on... Yes I am making progress with the office and no I am not going to have it done by the time I return to work on Monday. My target is now January 1, 2009. Seems like a while to put together one room. Well it's like this... Come Monday, I have six days at home until the end of the year.

I feel badly for not blogging very photographically this week but it is what it is. I was blog sniping earlier and came across John Knak's post about another photographer by the name of Seam McCormack and he had a very cool way to generate a triptych right in Lightroom. You can check out the video right here.

What is really cool about this is it took about three minutes to generate the effect. Of course I saved it as a preset so next time I just get the three copies, position and I am done. This can be done in Photoshop also by using a number of layers and layer masks, back ground layer and a stroke layer. It was just to easy to go do it in Lightroom. Way cool program Adobe!

Take care and I will see you all on the road... Doug