This week I just want to share a picture of my one-year old granddaughter. This is a pretty straightforward shot using a diffuser in direct sunlight and ETTL flash set at -2/3 stop. There was an Omni Bounce on the flash to soften it and blend with the soft diffuser light. Minimal Photoshopping on the background and foreground, with slight color correcting to warm up the image.

Used a Canon 70D with Canon 85/1.8. ISO 100 at about f/8.

Day for Night

I often see images whose mood is influenced by the imposition of unusual outdoor lighting conditions. I have admired those images that suspend the viewer between day and night, that play with our expectation of what sunlight or moonlight should do. This is the first of my responses to images like that.

This was originally a standard vacation photo shot at Lake Tahoe's Emerald Bay.

The first step was to add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer. The brightness went all the way down and the contrast all the way up. A hue/saturation layer was added next. While it might appear that all colors were desaturated equally, I paid attention to the trees the rocks, the sky and the water, adjusting each until it had the feeling of night.

Next, I dodged and burned using the non-destructive method of adding a gray layer in overlay mode and painting on it with black and white at about 50% opacity. This brought out the texture in the far trees. I played down the brightness of the near rocks and made sure the island stood out. To give the image some extra pop I created a new image layer and used apply image to create one layer with all the adjustments merged. Over that I added a curves adjustment layer and used apply image to create a mask. The light area of the images became the light areas of the mask and when I adjusted the curve, only the highlight areas were affected.

Finally I created a duplicate layer, treated it with a high pass filter, and set the layer mode to overlay. Hitting that layer with a surface blur filter gave a little mystery to the image.

I have debated over whether the image is too dark. I seem to want to see what's going on a little better. However, the feeling I get is one I've had in dreams where I am in a dark room and I want to turn on the light, but it's broken. There is something urgent about needing to see, and I think this picture, so typical on the one hand in it's straightforward pictorial statement, on the other is a perfect vehicle for the dream-inspired conflict I feel while straining to see, to accustom my vision to my surroundings.

Spontaneity

I picked this for an upload because there was spontaneity in the act. I admit that I am still working toward photographs that require a lot of advance planning. Really good composites have to "storyboard" what needs to happen in order to produce an image composed from many photos. I have some ideas on the back burner, but that's coming. I've done some, and I will share them, but it's still a technique in progress.

This picture, on the other hand, proceeds from spontaneity and momentary decisions. The picture, for instance was not something I had planned to take. While killing a little time, though, and since I had my camera with me, I knew I'd wish I had taken a few pics if I'd left here without any. So, on a whim, I grabbed some shots. What's more, all the birds in the area were right on the shore until I moved in close. After taking off in a flurry, they began to return, and I caught this one gliding in. Again, an unexpected development created an opportunity.

Then, tonight, I was watching TV and the graphics behind the people being interviewed incorporated some sort of texture, added through Photoshop. I wanted to try to copy what they'd done, what looked like some ink smudges, scratching, and water spots. I knew I could create that by taking a picture (or pictures) of some smudged ink, some ink drops, some scratching of soot from a glass plate held over a white surface, etc. But I wanted something easier, so, on a whim, I grabbed my iPhone and took a picture of the granite in the bathroom. After importing it, I used a b/w negative image of the granite in Overlay mode (layer 1 below) to make one set of textures, then, used it again, slightly stretched, converted to a gradient layer, again using Overlay mode.

I used masks to control the effect of the textures and did a little dodging and burning on the images in layers 1 and 2 as well. Since the bird is flying, I felt that a horizontal crop would emphasize the motion.

Finally, above is the same picture, but flipped. For those of us that read left to right, the left-to-right motion of the bird should now imply moving forward in time. In the movies, such a movement implies positive progress in the narrative arc. Hmm...the bird is just trying to get somewhere it wants to go.

At any rate, the whole thing (the Photoshop part) only took a few minutes. Sometimes I spend an hour, sometimes more, working out effects, but this was the result of a few quick decisions. I like the result, and while its merits can be debated, I think it's interesting and "moody." It may even possess a message, if anyone cares to bestow one. The point is that I think it's okay to be spontaneous. It's also important to know one's medium well enough to be spontaneous. This certainly isn't full of difficult techniques, but familiarity with Photoshop allowed me envision results and pull out the right tools. In other words, I wasn't simply goofing around with effects. I could spontaneously picture the desired effect and then, knowing where to look for it, find and apply the best tool for the job.

Recreating enlarger-based soft focus

The main technique I was trying to achieve here was one I used to get working in the darkroom. Stretching a piece of dark nylon across the enlarger lens cause the light falling through the shadow areas of the negative to spill over. I used (in CS5) threshold to create an image of the dark areas I wanted to spill and used that to create a mask that was then manipulated with the refine layers dialogue. I believe I experimented a little with blending options to get the effect, but the basic technique is isolating the dark areas with a mask and feathering it. The one thing that bugs me about this picture is the burned out white area in the upper left. I tried several things to fill it in, but ultimately it acts to keep the viewer focused on the central figure. Every other option created a more pleasing square corner, but lacked the centering power of the bright white sky.

A recent attempt at photo illustration

I was watching the most recent episode of KQED's Quest when I saw the work of botanical illustrator Kandis Elliot. She starts with photographs and then uses software (CS6?) to enhance the pictures, turning them into beautiful illustrations. I used several techniques to try something in the same vein. I used various masking and selection techniques to flatten the tonal values to mimic something more like gouache or watercolor. I tried not to use "out of the box" Photoshop filters, but I did use the "dry brush" to achieve texture. Other techniques included using "apply image" to generate masks (and reverse masks), using a "threshold" layer adjustment to generate and image which was then blended to achieve some dark detail, using a gray layer in overlay mode for dodging and burning, creating an image with the "charcoal" filter to achieve an image blended in "darken" mode (I think), and using the "blend if" options and darken mode. I used a shallow knock out too, if I recall. In the next installment of this blog, I'll show a different image using similar techniques. The important thing, I have found, is that familiarity with the various tools allows me to approach the subject with some spontaneity, forgoing the need to execute a formula.

Mobile art

Right now my favorite photo apps are Photosynth, PhotoStudio, Painteresque, and Dynamic Light, all of which I used on this photo at the Don Edwards Nature Reserve here in the East Bay. The day was a little foggy, but Photosynth did a good job of evening out the exposure between areas in the sun's direction and those at right angles. The blown out area that was overexposed allowed Painteresque to add some interesting arc-shaped artifacts, which I actually like. The grungy spots come from PhotoStudio and the overall mood is the result of using Dynamic Light's "Dutch light" setting. 

A little history

I remember the day, even the moment I decided to take up photography. I was about eleven or twelve and the thought simply occurred to me that I should have a hobby. My grandfather worked in a camera store and had a darkroom, and my mother had an old Voightländer Vitessa 35mm camera. In between seventh and eighth grade I swept floors at A-1 Photo, the store my grandfather bought that year, and then in high school I worked behind the counter. Eventually I worked the photo lab there as well.  In the early 1980s I worked for an up and coming volume family photography outfit and worked both out of a trailer and in peoples' homes. Later, I moved to Sacramento and worked for an in-home family portrait outfit. In the early nineties I was back in San Pedro, at my grandfathers lab. There was a wedding chapel in town where I shot a few weddings on the weekend and a small newspaper that I shot all kinds of things for, from portraits, to advertisements, to news coverage. The local daily news photogs in town knew me and threw assignments my way occasionally.  I also hooked up with my earlier family photography employer, which had by then grown considerably. I was kind of disappointed when the guy who'd fired me didn't even recognize me. Jerk. At any rate, around that time, I got tired of what amounted to getting a new job every week and jumped a the chance for steady employment when a friend told me about an office position. 

With a little income in my pocket, I was free to take pictures of things I liked, but the only time I had free was at night, so, I did a lot of night photography in black and white. I even had a showing at a local art center, but was prevented from attending my own opening because of my day job. The people at the center were toying with the idea of hiring me as a photography instructor, but it fell through, and then they lost the portfolio I'd let them borrow. Still, I did the occasional wedding, assisted a few times with other pros and kept at it. I lived in a one room cottage, where the bedroom was a darkroom. I slept on the floor in the living room, until I got a mattress.

I haven't mentioned being married and divorced and having a daughter, but that all happened too, and in 2001 I met Michelle. In 2002 we got married and I insisted on shooting pictures at my own wedding. I set them up, and my stepdad snapped them. He had been a crime scene photographer, so I figured he was the best qualified person to do it. Michelle encouraged me to approach my daughter's school band director about taking pictures. That worked, and then we did it at the high school. That happened for a number of years, but the school recently contracted with a big outfit to do the yearbook pics, and they took over everything.  The property management company Michelle works for has hired me many times now to shoot pictures of their properties, and I also have a photo station set up when she has a big community event, like a Halloween carnival. We have continued to shoot weddings, using only word of mouth advertising. That's been fine. I always say that weddings are the best events to shoot: everyone is dressed up, happy and expecting to get their pictures taken. Now, I feel like I want to get back into portraiture. My daughter, now grown and married, just had a baby, so I have built-in clients. It's given me fresh energy, and I'm looking forward to producing some great work again soon. 

Evelyn