Ice Storm '08

I thought I'd just post some pictures from this week's ice storm. Enjoy.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Week 8 - Adjustments

So I have to admit I took this assignment a bit too far and got in a little over my head. When looking through images to adjust, I found one that had shadows and aimed to replace them imperfectly. My first attempt was enough to feel I could ask my wife for a handful of pointers and try again. My second and third were not much better, but I felt I was on to something. Now after try four (by which I mean starting from scratch each time) I'm willing to admit I was attempting something that neither matched our week's requirement nor my skill level. I only present these to show I was doing something this week.

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I guess I aimed too high because I felt I had enough experience with level adjustments to look for a bigger challenge. For example, I've scanned hundreds of images using both a slide and normal scanner and often these require level adjustments. But in the end I decided to make my task easier and chose the following three images to adjust - original first:

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Brightness +65, Contrast -50, Saturation +20, Lightness +8

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Brightness -50, Contrast +88, Saturation +18, magic tool wand sky and brightness -35, contrast -50

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Saturation +46, then I adjusted Brightness and Contrast but I don't have specifics

Week 8 - Photomosaic

Let me first point out that I'm a big fan of Photomosaics. Besides having seen posters (like the American dollar bill made out of currency from around the world), I first fell in love with the art when I found a Photomosaic puzzle of the Earth at a yard sale. After completing it (this took months and many backaches to finish it) my wife and I purchased and completed the Starry Starry Night puzzle. We next purchased the La Grande Jatte Photomosaic puzzle, but have not started it yet. Although this may seem like an odd way to become familiar with the art, when completing a puzzle one must analyze every piece; however, when it comes to a Photomosaic puzzle, one must analyze every picture (often up to six) that appears on every piece. This hobby really made me appreciate all the images that make up the final Photomosaic picture.

Lastly, I was excited to realize that Apple's new operating system, Leopard, has a Photomosaic option for one's screen saver. After selecting a picture folder, the screen saver will first display a single image then zoom out to expose adjacent images until they all join together to form a single, different picture - that's the best I can describe it.

All that said, here is a self Photomosaic portrait made from my newly scanned Appalachian Trail photo collection. My first attempt (although much truer to the original photo's colors) appeared bland, rotated images 90 degrees, and seemed to allow too many duplicates. So, for this second one, I set the tiles to 2000, limited duplicates to 50 times, unchecked the rotate option, and... I think that's about it. In contrast to my first attempt, this image appears to have used more green in my "blue" t-shirt because I set these limitations.

Week 7 - Compositing

So I was going through a collection of the pictures I've shared with this class and came up with three designs I'd like to share.

In this first one, I simply used the magnetic lasso tool in order to select the red eft from one picture so I could drag it over to a second picture. I then used the Rectangular Marquee tool in order to erase part of the eft's torso so it appeared to be coming from behind the left hand wall. I tried to work its tail in, but in the end I just hid the layer. Lastly, I used the clone stamp tool to round out its face.

In this second picture I wanted to play around with filling in the center of a sunflower. First I used the Elliptical Marquee tool to clear of the flower's center. Next, I once again used the magnetic lasso to trace the flower's outline. Then I dragged the petal outline over to the arrow hole of Doune Castle in Scotland. However, this one move left the castle wall filling in the borders of the picture, so I used the clone stamp tool to expand the the countryside and white sky to the photo's outer corners. It still looked pretty bland, so next I copied the sunset from my Oregon beach picture and the clouds from over Franconia Ridge in NH. It's not the greatest, but two countries and three states are represented.

This final idea came at the last minute and I was too impressed with the result not to include it in this week's post. I came across this picture I have of a statue near Buckingham Palace in London. In the original, the form is so dark that it's essentially a silhouette, so I used the magic wand tool to select the negative (black) space and deleted it's contents. Next I moved in the image of the hazy trees and placed it behind the first layer. Very simple creation, but I feel it's very effective.

Two things I'd like to point out: for each of these I created a new background layer and in a few instances I drew a selection area and then used Select/Inverse in order to protect my selected area from changes.

Week 6 - Landscapes

I haven't been making too many trips lately, but not only do I have a lot of landscape shots I've also taken many over this past summer. In fact, I might I think I'll just embed another slideshow:



I'll add descriptions to each photo to calm everyone's curiosity.

The landscape site was a little too romantic and poetic for me, but I appreciated their passion for the perfect photo. Landscapes to me are an expanse of natural land (I just realized the site defines a landscape as "an expanse of natural scenery" but this would have been my answer anyway so I'll keep it). They can include man made objects, but distance should be displayed through various levels of scenery.

I think that often the largest contributor to getting the perfect landscape photo is perspective, which means that one must be in the perfect spot to get the shot. One must also be able to recognize depth; for instance, one might photograph a collection of trees, but they should also be aware of what's behind the trees and set their angle to take advantage of the scene's multiple levels.

One thing I enjoyed from the site was a reference to the passage of time in one's landscape photo.

Week 5 - Composition and Aesthetics Research

For this week’s research assignment on composition and aesthetics, I used our Hartness Library’s Academic OneFile article search engine and found a piece written by Chong Ho Yu from the August 2003 PSA Journal titled On Symmetrical Composition (Aesthetics of Photography).

In this article, Ho Yu discusses how the rules of vertical and horizontal composition differ from one another. He explains how, when a large subject (such as a tree) is centered vertically, it divides a photo into two equal parts thereby making the photo less interesting. However, either moving the subject into one of the two rule of thirds’ quadrants or including another subject that only appears on the left or right side can alter the photo’s symmetry making the it more pleasing.

Interestingly, Ho Yu explains that the same is not true for horizontal symmetry. The example used in the article is the original tree, only this time the shot includes the sidewalk in front of the tree where it casts its shadow. The photo is divided into two sections (top and bottom) but now the shot is more appealing because the two sides are not symmetrical.

The last point made is that people universally view an item from top to bottom, not left to right (left to right perception varies by culture). A horizontally centered dam, road, or bridge can work as long as one’s focus isn’t drawn to something above it. Additionally, he warns a person not to place their main subject in the bottom of their photo unless they purposely steer a viewer’s eye away from the top by raising the horizontal line up.