Sometimes You Feel Like You're On Top Of It All

First thing I'd like to do is give a shout out to the folks over at ALLTOP. Alltop is a news aggregator where you can plug in a search term, such as Photoshop, Photography, Lightroom (the three I use) or just about any other topic you might be interested in and it'll gather up a large array of sites based on the subject you've specified. I use it every day to do a quick catch up on the things that directly influence things around the gallery. Well, if you were to do an Alltop grouping of all things Photoshop, The Kayview Gallery will now show up on the list. It's an honor to be listed among some pretty select company.

It sort of rare to find a landscape image with the diverse color range that we see in today's image. Coming directly out of the camera as a raw file it looked very little like what you see here. It's one of the few shots I've had where every single color was muted. At first glance it was a pretty dull, drab looking set of pixels. Contrast was another problem and there was no snap. If ever an image went from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan (by comparison at least), this was it. Is it the definitive shot of the Grand Canyon? No, but it does capture, for me, what I saw stand on the edge of the abyss. To find out how this shot was "developed", hit the "read more".
Read more!

Playing With Post Production Lighting Effects

If today's image looks somewhat familiar, not only do you have a good eye, but you've been reading this blog since the wee small numbers. A similar shot (same flower, different pose) was used back in May '09, more the one hundred posts ago. I was flipping through the files, looking for something to build a topic around and came across the session where the shots of this flower lay. I wondered if I could figure out how to resurrect an image that had been passed over before. The problems with today's raw shot were many. The flower was tilted toward about ten o'clock, the stem came directly out of the southeast corner, there was too much negative space above the stamen and on and on. It looked sort of bleak. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it, so I gave myself a limit of five minutes to make it look promising and no more than a half hour to complete the transformation. As soon as I did a Select All (CRTL A) and Free Transform (CTRL T) I thought I had something. Turning the flower from the thirty degree angle to the near vertical did a couple good things, and several bad things. The good included giving the flower a much more pleasing appearance while bringing the stem out from the absolute corner to a more manageable location. Since the shot was reasonably tight, it also gave blank white triangles of non-image in each but the northeast corner. To find out what trickery I used to fill in the corners and "light" the flower, hit the "read more".

Read more!

Pieces Of Larger Images

Notice anything similar between the smaller image and today's "finished" image? They're both the same flag. I saw the "original" shot on a cloudy, blustery day when the breeze was snapping the flag at a pretty good pace. It was a great day for getting rich, vibrant colors in the flag, but a dud of a day for anything to do with the sky. The background shot in the "finished" image was taken on a day when the clouds looked great, but there was no interesting subject. If you were to flip back through the posts on this blog you'd find that same flag in a couple of images. The shot of the farm scene has it up on the silo. How it would have been hoisted I haven't the foggiest idea, but people have accepted it as being okay. Another shot, with the flag tipped on a fairly steep angle, is that of the fireman's hat and clouds. It's an element that can be used over and over again. Same with the clouds. They can be popped in where ever needed. Getting the images to combine is the topic of today's post. To find out how easy it is, hit the "read more".

Read more!

Going Overboard

Today's image is of a young friend. His team had just placed well in a rowing regatta and he was running over, expressing his joy that his parents had been able to see the team do so well. I thought the shot came out pretty good and gave the parents a print the next time I saw them. His mother took a look at the image and said to her son, "oh, I didn't know you had so many freckles". I looked at the boy and he didn't have the same facial texture as the boy in the print. In my exuberance to produce the sharpest possibly print I had gone too far and wound up with all sorts of artifacts he his face that gave the appearance of freckles. Oops! One thing we have to be mindful of when shooting people is perception. How people record on a piece of film or a digital sensor is not always the way they want to be seen. Another example of being too "accurate" with an image occurred about two months ago. A group of friends offered to take some portraits of the senior citizens group in one of the towns nearby. I setup the lighting, my friend who's the really good portraitist did the shooting and another friend was going to do the retouching and printing. There were a few others handling the paperwork and coordination, so we had a pretty good team. When the images got to the retoucher she commented that there was nothing that needed to be done other than a little tighter cropping. The photographer said "what about sharpening?". I suggested that we probably didn't want to "sharpen" people from a senior center. The prints were printed and handed out to the subjects. I noticed one women looking at her image with sort of a semi-sad face. I asked her if the shot was alright. She said it was very nice, but her expression gave away a hint of disappointment. On the way home I figured it out. It wasn't the shot that had saddened her, it was the person looking back at her. She was a great, dignified looking lady of about sixty-five. That was the issue. When we look in a mirror we often don't see the same person looking back. I swear, when I look in a mirror I see a fairly trim twenty year old looking back. The photograph doesn't lie, but sometimes it would probably be kinder if it did. Five minutes of touchup could have made that regal lady look a little less like the queen and a little more like the princess she once was. It was an interesting lesson. To find out what was done to the young man in today's image, hit the "read more".

Read more!

Sometimes You Just Goof Around

I was looking through some older files this morning and came across an old shot of a swan. Notice I said "a" swan. It crossed my feeble mind that the neck looked like the shape of half a heart. How's this for justification? February is coming up pretty quick, Valentine's Day is in February, so let's do something saleable to the greeting card industry. I'm thinking the 2011 season, as any cards that will be out for this year are already on the store shelves. I wanted to make it a little harder for the casual observer to see that it's one swan, copied and flipped to create the second participant. There's a stick crossing the tail of the swan on the right, along with some debris in the lower right hand corner. The right swan has a drop of water coming off its beak, the left one doesn't. It was a little ten or fifteen minutes project to make some whimsical. Every now and then we all need to stop and let our playful side out. Doing something, anything silly is needed by all of us. If we stay too serious for too long we tend to crumple into state of depression. I just read a quote in the paper this morning I thought dovetailed with my mood today. Apparently the author Sue Grafton said "Sometimes I wonder what the difference is between being cautious and being dead". Sounds good to me. Caution is stifling, throwing caution to the wind is liberating. Along the same line is a song that was on the charts a few months ago. Lee Ann Womack had a song called "I hope you dance". The chorus says "And when you get a chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance". It goes right along with the Sue Grafton quote. So much for "inspiration", if you'd like to know how the changes were made to today's image, hit the "read more".

Read more!

Photo Restoration?

Some photo finishers might try to take a "snap" from 1944 and lovingly take the creases and folds out of the image and restore it to pristine condition. Some may even apply a faux hand tint to it to make it look like someone did something special to it 66 years ago. I sort of went the other way on today's image. I took a shot from a reenactment demonstration last summer and tried to make it look like it had several decades of being carried around and then had been tossed into a drawer to be forgotten. I probably need to do a little more work (probably start over with the original) to get it looking aged. The "cracks" need some work. They need to be rougher and have the emulsion look like it's separated. The edges of the "print" need to be more distressed and the overall image of the image needs to be discolored. I print isn't going to sit in some GIs wallet throughout the war and then survive in a drawer without getting pretty well damaged. It's not bad for a first attempt, but if you're interested in how I'll address the next round, hit the "read more".

Read more!

The Advantages Of Insomnia In Photography

One of the advantages of waking up at 3:00 AM is that you're all set for sunrise photography. It could be said that another is getting blog entries up for people in the eastern US to have with their morning coffee. The former is cool, the later a little sketchy. Today's image is a result of the cool portion of the equation. Let's see, early morning, cool temperatures, warm(ish) water equals fog. Fog is a good thing for certain types of shots. Today's is one of those shots. About fifteen minutes after this image was made, if I stood in exactly the same spot and pointed the camera in the same direction, at the same height, we'd see the rock breakwater about fifty feet past the last boat. The shot would have been totally different and not anywhere near as interesting. Typically, with a "fog shot" you need a couple of elements. Something strong that attracts the eye, like the light/horn/object at the front of the lead boat. It could be a tree in the mist or a set of railroad tracks fading into the fog. Something to arrest the eye. Another element that makes this work is a splash of color. Here it's provided by the red of the second boat. The green grass leading up to that tree or brown of the railroad tie in the foreground might work just as well. In today's shot the red is pretty strong. The color element of the tree or track shots wouldn't have to be strong, just a hint of color would do fine. Fog shots are, for the most part, opportunistic shots. Sure, you can check the local forecast and increase the odds of there being fog (like when the local weather person says "there'll be fog in the morning"). But, having the right amount of fog, or being able to get the shot without distractions is a crapshoot at best. To find out more about today's image, hit the "read more".

Read more!