Mixing Media

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The evening of July 4th was bathed in glorious light for Banjamin's play. I cranked my Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) lens all the way out to capture the lad twirling in the hot spot.

The way that lens churns backgrounds into delirious bokeh is spellbinding, huh? And look how it captures the rim lighting! The optics we've got at reasonable prices today were beyond my dreams as a young photographer in the 60s. Whoa! The SIXTIES! They don't seem 45-50 years ago. AAARGH!

I knew as I took this series that I'd be cropping to reinforce the vertical feelings of the boy reaching toward the sun. And I suspected that I'd want to emphasize the romantic nature or eternal summer with an oil painting... plain air... mood.

So in PS4 I cropped it, adjusted the tonal range, snuck in some additional background flora, then turned to Topaz Adjustment to tease out the colors and the details in Benjamin's hair. From there I loaded up Alien Skin's Snap Art and carefully created a number of layers in Oil Paint, each with different brush sizes and shapes which I masked back into the image to emphasize the glow of the evening light. However, you can see I was careful to mask out the SnapArt entirely around Benjamin's face so that the final image is truly mixed media.

I like it as a portrait of a boy in the summer sun.

***

And the original? How much did it change? Here.. you decide. I'm certain you would have seen the boy so much differently in this original capture, huh? That's the nature of art isn't it? Each of our imagination's create a different story arc... Personal wonder... But of course... art without wonder is merely craft.