Help!

PhotoShop's Selection

Tech is irritating. Yeah, it's disrupting industries and businesses like a flame thrower, incinerating jobs, careers, and dreams... yadda, yadda... Forget the macro havoc, K? This is a more focused irritant. This picture. 

I had no intention of making this image. Instead I wanted to make an image something like this...

Ted's Selection

Oh, I'd have changed the dynamic range to tease the bearded man's image out from the background.But essentially, this was I wanted to start. And Photoshop simply won't let me! "Huh?" you ask. "Ted, you've studied and worked in Photoshop for eighteen years. You've mastered its every nuance. So wudda' hell's the problem here?"

I don't know. I've poured over the THICK manuals. Tried endless permutations. I've managed to create that second image up above in the application. But when I save it... only the first image appears!!??? And it is awful. Worse, the manuals are mute on this problem. So far it's absorbed two days of tweaking and shaking. I've thought about bashing it with a hammer... Finally I did a screen shot of the pre-saved image and it's that screen shot of the adjusted image before flattening that's posted second here. 

Frankly it needs a lot more work to bring out the details around his eyes, hair and beard. I'd like to have more 3D modeling. But why bother? I cannot save the worked version, much less export a jpg for export. 

Arthur C. Clarke's written, "A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from witchcraft." Uh, huh. There's a gremlin in my machine that will not let me do what I have done routinely until this image. &*^&%$!! 

Anybody know why adjustment layers won't compress or flatten without disappearing? Has it something to do with the B&W gamut? Should I work in a CMYK space instead of rgb or srgb? Where do I buy an aerosol can of gremlin remover? AAARGH!

Crapping Up The Urnings

I'm thinking that what made the 1910-1920s B&W images seem profound was to a certain degree the way that their camera lenses sucked. There were so many opportunities for light to gyrate inside their lens barrel, then imperfections in the glass would slice away at image edges so that high contrast pictures seemed to smoke off into misty fog.

It's the curse of our tech that we can only get that effect by crapping at the laser sharp stuff that decent cameras (and even indecent cameras) now capture. What has perfection hidden away? A couple of posts back... On March 18th, this urn caught my attention when I saw it outside of Robber Baron, Henry Flaggler's Whitehall mansion. But my Canon 7D's too good to replicate early20th century fine art photography. So... How about another go at the thing...

A foggy burst of urn

Made misty, this marble sculpture sort of emerges from a dream... The dream of a guy who was rich beyond imagining when most people weren't. OTH, what's new?

Once There Wasn't Color

Standard Oil tycoon Henry Flagler built his Palm Beach palace, Whitehall in 1902. It was the photographic age dominated in America by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, arguably this country's fathers of fine art photography. Kodak disposable cameras were around for over two decades when Whitehall went up, democratizing photography by stripping it away from heavy metal priests who lumbered under giant 8X10 monsters, speaking in a tongue reserved for initiates into a secret craft.

But the Big Camera artistes were finally breaking into galleries with exquisitely exposed and focused large format prints of very still objects captured in squint-bright sunlight to maximize depth of field and tonal range.

The marble urns on Whitehall's front portico ooze out the feelings of the Gilded Age, don't they? Look at their perfection. Imagine the skills of their unknown crafters. I see these twin prints framed large on the walls of an old-money mansion. Or perhaps the waiting room of a great city's largest white-shoe law-firm or  brokerage house. They belong to a hushed-place thick with the scent of money.

Now we can do this without tripods on a Canon 7D through its standard sense with the help of the custom controls that PS-CC allows Alien Skin's Exposure X to bring to bear.

Eye - Lash Nostalgia

Samantha At 3

I remember TriX. You? I remember pushing it in a custom hot developer brew to 1,200 ASA and beyond to grab three, four, even five stops along with contrast baggage in a grainy snowstorm. Then hunting for the softest paper or the lowest Polycontrast Filter... Pushing the print through a Bessler diffusion enlarger. Burning in its highlights, holding back shadows... Lots of hand action - Waving like a magician between the lens and paper frame. Every image was a one-off - irreproducible. If a client wanted multiple copies, well, that was a challenge.

Paper was cheap. So was my time. I'd spend an orange-lamp night to leave one 11X14" matte print hanging to air-dry till morning. Now? 

Oh well, look at Sami's eyelashes up there, huh? She was three years old last Christmas (2014) evening, glowing from single-bulb lamplight across the room with a TV monitor doing the fill. Now I scalpel away the color, and crop it. Maybe diddle with the dynamic range some in Photoshop... A half hour job to make a hugely reproducible image. 

I'm writing a December article for our magazines. It's about something that will happen in 2025. One at a time, I'm discussing economic, social, and cultural possibilities with a bunch of experts. Everyone has a different take. And it occurs to me that we've enjoyed a wonderful photographic party over my life. My biggest regret just now is that there can be... will be... Unimaginable parties that I'm going to miss. 

Somehow it makes me nostalgic... For the Sami-future that will happen almost in the blink of her mile long eyelash... Sigh... 

Three River In The Night

Way above the Three Rivers of Pittsburg there's elegant dining behind a crystal wall... It's been there since the 1930s and 40s when Sinatra fronted the Dorsey Band up in the night-time sky with Steel City glimmering out to the horizon.

So okay so far... but.. Well. That's when Fred and Ginger were whirling through platinum and night dust... And Those evenings glimmered like diamonds on a princess's tiara. 

Hell, we can do color now with the ease of decorking champaign. So why remove it? And yet... sometimes a color-ectomy glides into a space where my emotions are so much differently receptive. Why izzat? Thoughts? Feelings? 

BTW... See that point down there? That's the hotel where Rita and I held our wedding reception 47 years ago tonight. Seems like yesterday.