The Right To Bare Arms?

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Men2Mountains: 2011... This is the Potter County, Pennsylvania hunting camp. Here's an All-American and an Eagle Scout. The guy in the blue vest's swimming record still holds at William and Mary College... the guy mugging it up in the orange hat's just earned his Eagle Scout. BTW, that's my buddy Chris Herr in that blue vest... Looking healthy and happy just a handful of time back at his Lucky 7 hunting lodge on a chilly morning. S morning FAR to cold to bare anything but fingers. Yep... in that cold it's just not right to bare arms.

Incidentally, the dazzling color's enhanced by AlienSkin's impressive new Exposure4. I used the pre-set for Color Films and applied Fuji Pro 160C... a classic recipe that always popped the multi-chromatic range up. Then I selectively cranked back the red saturation in the skin tones in PS4. The overall effect is POW-erful, don't you think? The tonal range SINGS!

At 10 mm the Canon EF-S 10-22mm imposes a chromatic fringe that needs to be death with in post processing. You can't see it here in the jpg, but when you pop the suckers up... there's a neon effect that's not-pleasantly startling. Still, while it takes a bit of time, it's easily dealt with in PhotoShop.

GEEK Stuff.... Canon 7D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5) at 10m, PS4: custom brushes and filters, AlienSkin: Exposure4, Color Films: Fuji 160C, Topaz 4: Custom.

After Her Paint Faded

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Memories are dreams
When they’re the only
Way to repaint a
Hope seared of color
By the flame of choice.

Canon 7D, PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, Impasto, Custom filters & brushes

Somewhere in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania.

When We Were Rich (er)

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Coudersport, Pennsylvania is a very small town. And right in it’s dead center there’s this house. Built when Coudersport’s was nostalgic for the future. Now, like the house, the nostalgia seems to... peer in the other direction.

Canon 7D, 10mm, PS4: Alien Skin, PopArt: Topaz, Custom textures & brushes

What I Did At Spring Camp...

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This image of me is sort of for my buddy Andreas Manessinger since he and I have this slightly, um, different conclusion about America's Second Amendment.

I was invited by my friend Chris to attend the annual Men2Mountains at his private hunting lodge and compound up in Potter County, Pennsylvania last weekend. The place is about a 5 hour drive over sometimes primitive roads into the north-central Pennsylvania mountains. There's still a carpet of snow in the shadows.And it snow showered on Saturday. There were eleven of us ranging in age from two Eagle Scouts who are 14 and 15 to the patriarch who's 85.

And then there were the toys. First off the weaponry was all handheld. Unlike my friend Charlie Smithgall's cannon/mortar/gattling gun shoot... What we used up in M2M were long guns and pistols. Each of the men are expert in their own weapons and careful instructors for those who lack that knowledge. And while it was explosive fun... the four ranges were carefully worked out for safety.

Two of the guys are trained chefs. You can imagine the food that eleven mountain men brought along.

I said four ranges. One was for shotgun clay shooting. Another was some 350 yards up a steep hillside for long guns. Finally there were two pistol targets: one for close self defense (10-12') and the other for handgun target shooting at around 30'.

While someone did bring a breech loader no one used it. But there were a ton of cartridge antique weapons that you rarely see much less get a chance to fire. I brought my own .38 cal Smith & Wesson Model 6. Yeah, I have a concealed carry permit like most PA gun owners. That's my gun on my hip in the picture up there, the others I picked up from ground coverings where dozens of single and double action weapons sat waiting to be used.

In America virtually no one lives behind the security screens that adorn most windows in Europe and much of the rest of the world. But I guess the understanding that so many folks have their own weapons does tend to discourage a lot of bad guys from breaking and entry, huh?

So... when I write that I was away at a weekend shoot... Well, maybe it has a different meaning to a bunch of photographers, huh? BTW... I am NOT a hunter. Bambi's and Thumper are safe from me :-)

Last point... Was all of this manly? Wuff! You can smell the testosterone farther than gunpowder. I came home with a real-man swagger and my voice an octave lower. Okay... gotta go now and chew some nails....

Fisher's Bench

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You know: There's a really big difference between showing a moment, and revealing its quality and character. I'm convinced that technique is what cranks volume into an artist's voice... Right? Technique lets me dig out the feelings I want to communicate with you. It's reassuring to know how many tools we have in our bag now. How much volume we're able to build up.

PreProcessing The hunting camp up in Potter County has a couple of stocked trout ponds. Here's one I like that looked wonderful through my Canon 40D. PostProcessng The tone mapping was done in PhotoShop CS4 with the help of Topaz where I imagined the mist. Then I used AlienSkin's Snap Art's water color tools to tease out some golden grit.

THE VIRGIN IMAGE!

Haven't done this for a while, but given how much effort this image took... thought you'd enjoy seeing the original I stitched together from four shots into a panorama. Enjoy....

Potter County #6: Gene Kelly?

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Hey, that's pretty cool! Downtown Coudersport sitting in the August saturday sun. Looking like... like... Looking like this image here. The way it's looked for what? A century? More?


You know how people say, "New York City? Yeah, it's a wonderful place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there."??? Well to a whole lot of people who remember a time that they learned about in history class... Coudersport's the sort of very small town where they'd like to visit and live.

Thing is though, it's not real easy to find, which is why maybe it's been preserved. Wasn't there a vincent Miinelli movie once about Scottish village that disappears into the Highland mist and returns for a day every century? Hmmm... Not sure but odd how the woman dancing just off to that park on the left there... Just beyond the frame... Odd how much she looked like, what was her name? Cyd Charise? Pity, I thought I'd caught her... Wonder why you can't see her?

You don't think???
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PreProcessing: As you probably realize by now, the only lens I took out in Potter County was the EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) I screwed onto my Canon 40D. Here I pointed it at Coudersport's main street and shot a series for a panoramic. PostProcessing: Stitched them together in CS4 and turned to Topaz to even out the dynamic range from the extreme light then AlienSkin's SnapArt's Impasto to build up paint into a three dimensional texture. And why... It's Almost Like Being In Love... eh?

Potter County #4: The Coudersport

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Ever seen a glimmering hunk of amber? You know, a translucent glob of ancient resin which collected around a seed, a bud, or an almost forgotten bloom in its center? And as you twirled it around, did it trigger memories that you didn’t really have? Recollections of a time before you should remember?

Coudersport is the county seat of Potter County, Pennsylvania and about 2,700 of the county’s 18,000 people live in the town that was formed in the early 1800s. Young, even by American standards, still it’s collected the ambitions of the turn of the twentieth century along a main street of shops, parks, and small office buildings. The streets hold memories of marching bands, and loggers. It is not a land that time forgot, rather one that time remembers lovingly – even longingly. If Coudersport did not exist, Disney would imagine it. In Coudersport you expected Mickey, Pluto, or Cinderella to skip out from door and alley ways.

On a sunny Saturday last week, it glimmered within its resin of amber time.
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PreProcessing: Again through my Canon’s EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) in Coudersport’s main street where I found their working movie house. PotProcessing: Lots of things going on here. I want to create a series of square format images that will hang among the various panos I created in Potter County and at the hunting lodge I posted a few days ago. To create the Edward Hopper mystique here I first turned to Topaz, then teased in two effects from AlienSkin’s SnapArt2. First the Comics filter, then I stroked in Impasto to deepen the nostalgic sense while reinforcing the palette that could have been washed out in the mid-day August light. Happily, I think it worked well.

Potter County #3: Pond 1(b)

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See if you write, say poetry, you keep your audience attentive with every paragraph, sentence, and word. And you string them together with no hiccups, burps, or stammers. Reality simply isn't allowed to muddy access, distract, or leap out to screech "BOO!"

That's what digital artists do now. Like I did here. Right?
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PreProcessing: Here's that pond I posted yesterday captured by my Canon 40D's EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) at the hunting lodge in Clara. PostProcessing: Okay, I had to move the furniture around a tad on this piece of the pond to enhance the dazzle of this misty place through a gentle sunrise shower. I did the reconstruction in PS4 and exploded the feelings with AlienSkin's Bokeh and SnapArt's oils. Sweet.

Potter County #2: Pond #1

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If you'll look again at my last post and peer just to the left of the building... well walk that way and immediately beside and to the rear of the lodge is where I stood to grab this pano of their first pond. In fact, that tree to the right here... see it? That's the tree which is framing the top of the lodge in yesterday's post. It seems as if the blue egrets have reduced the trout population this year since even through the mists you can see to the bottom of the six foot deep waters.

PreProcessing: As yesterday, I caught the series through my Canon 40D's EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6). PostProcessing: The four images stitched together nicely with CS4's merge tool. I cropped it some, diddled with the dynamic range then used Topaz and AlienSkin's watercolor devices to tease out the mystery of the pool.

Potter County #1: The Lodge

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Went to visit The Endless Mountains at their western edge this weekend. Here's the hunting camp that sits on its estate in Clara, a tiny town in Potter County, Pennsylvania. Quiet, remote, nice neighbors, but not many. It is a tad different from New York City a week or so ago. There's a reason that Pennsylvania's called the Keystone State. It's the doorway between the megalopolis of America's east coast and the country's west.
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This lodge sits on a LOT of land which forms the biggest part of an Appalachian mountain. Oddly, the folks up there don’t name their mountains, I guess because there are so many of the things? After all, when you have lawn full of grass, you don’t bother to name the blades, eh?

Um, did I mention that the guys never invite wives or lady-friends along? Un-huh, there are still places where men can drink, smoke cigars, play cards, scratch their…. um… And, oh yeah, sometimes hunt. Think of it as an ANTI-SPA. Wonder when that’ll get outlawed, huh?
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PreProcessing: I used my Canon D40 to capture a series through its EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6): PostProcessing: PS/CS4 stitched the shots together and after rigorously adjusting the dynamic range, adding a new sky, and eliminating a parked car – AlienSkin’s SnapArt2 techniques allowed me to mix colored pencils with oil paints and create a mixed media rendering of the lodge-where-women-don’t-go