Friday, December 12, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The Frog Prince revealed
Per a comment made by Rachelle, I decided to post some of the original pictures that were used in my photostory to Picassa. Here is the slideshow:
As I stated in my original post, a number of items were borrowed from the internet and so are not included in this collection, including: the crown and tiara;the prince 's face and body and king's body; the well; yellow ball; castle's interior; and a few models for the princess like Disney's Belle and Barbie.
As I stated in my original post, a number of items were borrowed from the internet and so are not included in this collection, including: the crown and tiara;the prince 's face and body and king's body; the well; yellow ball; castle's interior; and a few models for the princess like Disney's Belle and Barbie.
Actions Shots
I haven't had a chance to take many pictures this week; it's dark out when I get home and my inside action pictures are just plain blurry. So I decided to go with one I've always really liked from my collection. This picture was taken in continuous mode on my Fuji. My friend is slightly blurry against a static background, but I actually like that effect even if I originally intended to make him clear. I'll often use this mode to take pictures of moving objects. For instance, when I went whale watching a few years ago I'd take 5 consecutive pictures - only problem was I swear the animals intentionally weaved between my shots and only gave me tail...
Occasionally, when I'm photographing birds (hawks maybe) I'll try to follow their movement with the camera, but if I'm zoomed in too much I often lose then in my viewfinder and therefore lose the shot... This is not a technique I ever thought to perfect, but I like the idea of practicing on moving objects (cars, trains, etc...) to get a better feel of what works and what does not.
Below is another action picture of girls flinging leaves into the air. Watching this movement is so wonderful and I was happy to have my camera with me when I took this shot.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Jay's Final Project - The Frog Prince
Wow… you ever have that dream where you’re cutting out pieces of pictures and meticulously moving them around and you just can’t stop? Photo collages are a lot of fun, but man are they a lot of work.
Where to begin? I’ve also been taking a children’s literature course this semester and early on I thought I might want to illustrate The Frog King (or Prince) from The Juniper Tree and Other Tales of Grimm. I had taken a number of pictures of a frog last summer and thought it would make a great model for this project. I also had a ton of castle pictures and knew I could work them in too. And so, I combined these pictures and many others to create this fairytale slideshow.
It’s hard for me to explain what I’ve done; there was just so much to it. For the most part, I used the magic lasso a lot to isolate elements from pictures, as well as to create borders for my clone tool. I also used stencils often to frame a shape and cloned in the pattern I wanted, like the back of a frog’s head and the frame of a Barbie doll. The color replacement pen came in handy, as did the twirl filter to represent a curse both being made and broken. I also found that adjusting opacity and feathering created a lot of great effects.
I originally planned to show movement in every picture (the frog hopping, the finger waving, the princess skipping, the princess running) but my wife suggested limiting it to the ball, finger, and transformations, which I think was the right idea.
The castle in this story is Eilean Donan in Scotland; these pictures were taken last summer during our Great Britain vacation. The princess is modeled from various Barbie and Disney princess pictures I image-searched – the well, yellow ball, prince, and castle innards were also borrowed for educational purposes. What took me the longest was making my wife the princess and I the king; I considered not doing this, but the Barbie face just wasn’t doing it for me. If I had more time I’d continue working on these, but oh well.
As a last note: this is later than I hoped because many of my pictures are over 100mgs and my computer is having the hardest time opening and closing files.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Week 13 - Portraits
I don't know about you, but I'm beat from all the traveling I've done this week. I spent Thursday in Boston with my brother-in-law's family, worked on Friday, then shot down to NYC for the weekend. My internet access this has been unreliable because my sister is having provider transition issues, so I've taken today off to catch up.
I can't say I'll all that excited with the portrait shots I collected because my inside lighting was bad and I wasn't pleased with flash use. I'm going to post a few images, explain their style, and let each of you judge for yourselves how they came out.
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Left: my wife and nephew are concentrating on a block puzzle. Neither is looking straight at the camera; they are instead focused on an object within the picture. Right: My nephew (which is either Gabriel or Nicholas, they're twins) sitting on the floor focused on a toy. I was playing with angles and depth in this shot.
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I can't say I'll all that excited with the portrait shots I collected because my inside lighting was bad and I wasn't pleased with flash use. I'm going to post a few images, explain their style, and let each of you judge for yourselves how they came out.
<----->
Left: my wife and nephew are concentrating on a block puzzle. Neither is looking straight at the camera; they are instead focused on an object within the picture. Right: My nephew (which is either Gabriel or Nicholas, they're twins) sitting on the floor focused on a toy. I was playing with angles and depth in this shot.
<--->
Both: Candids of Gabriel coloring at a restaurant. Left: The lighting was bad, causing my pictures to come out blurry, so I used a flash here. Right: Taken without the flash with my sister in the background, adding depth and environment to the picture.
This is a picture of my wife being overwhelmed by the concrete, industrial building that is Costco. This upward angle show the store's factory-like ceiling as well as Jade's expression of discomfort. Costco was so crazy this weekend and it was a bit much for us small town folk.
I took a number of photos of my nephew Imani for a Nickelodeon audition he had Sunday night. I chose a bare wall, which I later darkened in PhotoShop. I altered a few, but I believe I used the clone stamp tool on this one to clear up his teenage skin slightly, taking away some blemishes. In this shot, my subject is looking directly at the camera.
Next, this is one of my twin nephews holding his hands in front of the camera. For some reason, one which only a 3-year old can understand, he wanted to take several pictures with his hands like this. This picture was originally taken in color, but I changed it to black & white in PhotoShop due to the washout out hands in the foreground; adjusting the brightness and highlights wasn't working well for me. I next used the burn tool slightly on his hands. Also every adjustment I made brought out too much detail, making his wands look like an old man or just plain cartoony.
These last two I just liked and decided to throw into the mix. I lightened each of these slightly to pull out some more detail from my subjects.
This is a picture of my wife being overwhelmed by the concrete, industrial building that is Costco. This upward angle show the store's factory-like ceiling as well as Jade's expression of discomfort. Costco was so crazy this weekend and it was a bit much for us small town folk.
I took a number of photos of my nephew Imani for a Nickelodeon audition he had Sunday night. I chose a bare wall, which I later darkened in PhotoShop. I altered a few, but I believe I used the clone stamp tool on this one to clear up his teenage skin slightly, taking away some blemishes. In this shot, my subject is looking directly at the camera.
Next, this is one of my twin nephews holding his hands in front of the camera. For some reason, one which only a 3-year old can understand, he wanted to take several pictures with his hands like this. This picture was originally taken in color, but I changed it to black & white in PhotoShop due to the washout out hands in the foreground; adjusting the brightness and highlights wasn't working well for me. I next used the burn tool slightly on his hands. Also every adjustment I made brought out too much detail, making his wands look like an old man or just plain cartoony.
These last two I just liked and decided to throw into the mix. I lightened each of these slightly to pull out some more detail from my subjects.Saturday, November 8, 2008
Week 10 - Cloning and Text Tools
I've used the cloning tool many times before, but I never knew about the various options available on the cloning window before; I even showed them to my wife and chances are they'll make her work life a lot easier. I chose 4 images to play with for this assignment.
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In this first one, I chose to create a double rainbow by positioning my cloning tool at the base of the existing rainbow, turning my overlay option on, reducing the second one's size slightly, and increasing the angle slightly as well. You may notice that I duplicated one tree, deleted another, took out the power line and pole, and lightened the entire sky to the left of my second rainbow.
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This one isn't as clean as it could be, but I thought it would be nice to fill in this picture with more palm trees. I created three different cloning sources, each one a different tree. Then I made each one slightly smaller than their originals and using the overlay again I four news trees to the image. Next I used the magic lasso tool to delete any sky that was cloned next to the trunks, which created a strange glow. I would have done more to the light (or dark) spots between the leaves, but...
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I thought it would be fun to remove the cat-strap from this picture. This one was all about turning off the aligned option. I wanted to preserve the ear piece's reflection as well as the chair's, so I had to be careful both not to clone over them or clone them elsewhere in the image.
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I thought this photo was a good example of removing items that blocked one's subject. In this one, I cloned my wife's hair to get rid of the fern, cloned some of her sweat jacket to cover a leaf, and cloned her hand to cover some twigs.
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Even though I played with some of the text styles, I prefered to use the clone tool for my text styles instead. In all three of these photos I created my text, opened a new layer, then used the Load Selection option under Select select the shape of my text. Next, with All Layers selected, I cloned either the leaves or petals of my photos and, still on my new layer, applied them to my selected area. I really like how this comes out. In the case of my final picture, I rotated the text and applied some warping settings so that it appeared to become smaller as it rose up the trunk.
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In this first one, I chose to create a double rainbow by positioning my cloning tool at the base of the existing rainbow, turning my overlay option on, reducing the second one's size slightly, and increasing the angle slightly as well. You may notice that I duplicated one tree, deleted another, took out the power line and pole, and lightened the entire sky to the left of my second rainbow.
& 
This one isn't as clean as it could be, but I thought it would be nice to fill in this picture with more palm trees. I created three different cloning sources, each one a different tree. Then I made each one slightly smaller than their originals and using the overlay again I four news trees to the image. Next I used the magic lasso tool to delete any sky that was cloned next to the trunks, which created a strange glow. I would have done more to the light (or dark) spots between the leaves, but...
& 
I thought it would be fun to remove the cat-strap from this picture. This one was all about turning off the aligned option. I wanted to preserve the ear piece's reflection as well as the chair's, so I had to be careful both not to clone over them or clone them elsewhere in the image.
& 
I thought this photo was a good example of removing items that blocked one's subject. In this one, I cloned my wife's hair to get rid of the fern, cloned some of her sweat jacket to cover a leaf, and cloned her hand to cover some twigs.
& 
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Even though I played with some of the text styles, I prefered to use the clone tool for my text styles instead. In all three of these photos I created my text, opened a new layer, then used the Load Selection option under Select select the shape of my text. Next, with All Layers selected, I cloned either the leaves or petals of my photos and, still on my new layer, applied them to my selected area. I really like how this comes out. In the case of my final picture, I rotated the text and applied some warping settings so that it appeared to become smaller as it rose up the trunk.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Week 9 - Burn, Dodge, and Filter
Sorry this is kind of late in the week. I was toying around with the burn and dodge tools this 
week and discovered I overuse them. Every time I tried to adjust a photo, the result would come out much worse than its original. Frustration would take over and I'd move on to a different picture. Finally I showed my wife some of my trials and she suggested I use it to accent existing shadows and highlights rather than use it to control brightness and darkness, which was my problem. I played around with this concept and adjusted this flower photo. The adjusted one on the left gives the appearance of sun coming through the tree branches whereas the original appears dark and drab.
week and discovered I overuse them. Every time I tried to adjust a photo, the result would come out much worse than its original. Frustration would take over and I'd move on to a different picture. Finally I showed my wife some of my trials and she suggested I use it to accent existing shadows and highlights rather than use it to control brightness and darkness, which was my problem. I played around with this concept and adjusted this flower photo. The adjusted one on the left gives the appearance of sun coming through the tree branches whereas the original appears dark and drab.Next I chose a handful of pictures and tried out a variety of filters. 
The first one here is my little friend, the red eft, still hiding under his mushroom. After a few trials, came across the graphic pen tool on page 320 of our book and thought it would make the picture look like a block from a comic, but this didn't really happen. However, I really like how it makes the picture look as though it had been sketched. I can't recall the settings I chose on this one, but I think I decreased the size of the stokes and darkened the brightness some.
The first one here is my little friend, the red eft, still hiding under his mushroom. After a few trials, came across the graphic pen tool on page 320 of our book and thought it would make the picture look like a block from a comic, but this didn't really happen. However, I really like how it makes the picture look as though it had been sketched. I can't recall the settings I chose on this one, but I think I decreased the size of the stokes and darkened the brightness some.
This second picture was taken about a week ago; it was taken looking up through a spiral of birch bark on the truck of a birch tree. There were a number of pictures I thought would look good with the glowing edges filter, but somehow this one stuck out the most for me. In fact, I stared at it for so long I began to see the name Obama in it. Can anyone else see that? On this one I changed the edge width to 6 and softness to 2.
Last, I really wanted to include my kitty and began searching for a filter that preserved her beauty and made her look as though she were painted. Again, using the book I found the angled strokes filter on page 319. I really like how this filter softened her fur (I never thought Sasha's fur could ever look softer than it already does). I made the direction balance about even, then increased my stroke length and sharpness.
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