One for Photoshop to work on

Photoshop has a lot of things that it can do and can do well if the operator knows what he/she is doing. However here is one for them to work on. 

I went to Astoria, OR and photographed the tower on the hill. It is a beautiful monument to the history of the area and there is such a beautiful mural on the tower. It goes in a circle from the bottom to the top slowly spiraling around the monument. The only problem is for a photographer is that you can't photograph it straight on so that in photoshop you could easily stitch it together to make the mural easy to see. You have to shoot it at a angle from below near the base of the tower. So I want photoshop to now work on putting photos together that are shot at an angle, stitch them together and then correct the angle, that should be easy. Well no it shouldn't but they seem to be able to do everything else and make it loook easy to those of us that have struggled with problems in the past and now find it so fun to do, such as the bandaid and stitching processes. Life could still be so much easier, well they have made it a lot easier so for that I am grateful.

More Trees

As you may have noticed I have become somewhat passionate about trees. Ever since I shot the ones while waiting in a church parking lot I have been looking a little more closely at them where ever I am. These were some from the Tryon Park in Oregon. It is interesting how the limbs of any two trees are never the same and then you add moss to them (as only can happen in such wet climates as Oregon) and you see a whole set of new shapes and beauty. I lkie to study them now.

I am lucky

I get to work with some very special young people in the church and it always amazes me of how much excitement and vitality that they have to share. So it is always fun to be able to return some of that fun to them once in awhile.

I have been very busy trying to get the new Ward Directory out this past week since we have just started a new semester at Brigham Young University and we now have another 148 students to get to know. I take the pictures of them and with minimal work in photoshop prepare the images for the directory but sometimes I just can't help myself from doing a little extra just for the reaction of the youth. (I may have gotten myself into trouble since the rest of them may want similar treatment now.) But for whatever the trouble it may cause here is the story behind it.

I told the young women that I would be taking their pictures. Now as usual some of them are not ready when I need to do it and so I told some of them that I would gladly redo them if they wanted. Well at our opening social in the park these three came forward and asked for new pictures stating that I had promised I would retake them. I will post all three of their images and you will be able to see what happened. This was fun for me because I was able to take good picture, reshoot and get a better pictures and then go into photoshop and make an even better pictures. I hope that they like what happened.



OK!
These first three images are the original "get them taken so I have them" images. They are cute pictures of the cute girls but as you will notice in the last of the three a little Star Wars has entered the scene. Now I am not sure the boys would dare to compete with him.




So at the party at the park I took three more pictures. Now this isn't a studio setting of course but I do most of my work in the great studio of the outdoors anyway and love to shoot in it as much as possible. Here are the three girls again. Still cute and having fun I hope as we take the pictures.



So, here is the final output from photoshop with a little close up cropping to make it possible to really be able to see their faces. Now they are not just cute girls here but instead they are beautiful girls. Any guy not wanting date one of them would be crazy. And this is what they looked like just for a party.

Now for a little bit of the "artsy" touch to the same images.



Another version:

Ya Gotta Luv Photoshop

We had an 80's look-a-like day at work today and I was asked to photograph all that participated. Well a lady from the accounting dept came down with the group and we got this image. Then when I got it into photoshop I did some refining by using LAB color and Radial blur and a few other things to get the second version shown below. Look for the subtle changes.

She wants a copy for her husband. Can't imagine why he would want one?

Wedding Distractions

I stay during the entire reception while photographing weddings and sometimes get a little distracted.

Now being distracted isn't a bad thing most of the time because you can end up having some fun images of the other things that happen during the reception that the bride and groom never get to be part of since they are busy meeting all those people that they don't usually know. 

In this series of images the Brother-in-law to the groom, if I remember correctly, was playing with his son and asked me to come take a few pictures of the two of them. We started out by doing rapid fire shots while he tossed his son into the air. After we had done it a couple of times I looked over and spotted the level of the sun against the horizon and suggested that we do it at a different location. 

The first ones that I took that night showed the two of them and you can tell who they are but these images capture just the fun of a dad tossing his son into the air without specifying who they are and thus leaving it open to any father and son that enjoy the fun of playing together.

A little fun with photo's

I get to work with a great bunch of youth at BYU. We just started a new term and so I have taken the photographs for the new directory for which I am responsible.

I just can't ignore the opportunity to do a few other photos though as requested by fun loving youth. And then there is the fun of enhancing them a little in photoshop. Since the center young lady was in sharp focus due to the lens focal length and aperture settings that I was using for the individual images, I decided to make her a little bit more the center of attention in the image by sharpening her eyes even more and then fading the others into the background. It doesn't take long to do but it sure makes a difference in the image. I did a little radial blur effect to it as well to give a little more separation from the others.

From Dragonfly to Grasshopper (Hopper)

Thanks to Pixar's "A Bugs Life" I saw something in a photo yesterday that was really quite fun. Observe as I show you what I saw while in Photoshop.

 It all started when a co-worker came back from lunch with a dead Dragonfly. When she looked at it's little face she saw a Chinese Dragonfly, I suppose the China Olympics might have inspired that thought.  So here below is a closeup of the little face and from this perspective it looks more like the face of a sea lion pup.

Then as I was shooting pictures of it for her, since it was an extremely colorful and beautiful creature, I took a few closeups of various parts of it's body just to catch all of the beauty that I could.  The first close-up was over exposed but gave way to a different image of it than I had expected.  I took it into photoshop and added the black background.  I love the patterns in it's wings which was what I was really shooing for in this shot.



However the next less exposed image started me on a little journey that was quite fun. Look closely at it's body and then compare it to the next image where I have isolated or cropped out a certain part.


Can you see where the image came from? This is when I saw something that I had least expected and that was an image in the likeness of Hopper from Pixar's movie "A Bug's Life". Can you see him? Yes it isn't exact but that was the character I thought of as I looked closely at whet I had isolated.


So I decided to go one step further and kind of isolated the likeness of Hopper from the image. It is just a portion of his face but it made me wonder if artist's don't often get their inspiration from looking at things just a little bit differently than the rest of us.

Now obviously this isn't really Hopper and I am not saying that it is, and you may not even see the likeness that I do, but as I photographed that beautiful Dragonfly I least expected to find something like this.