Candid Woman

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Tammy is camera shy. The lighting was a soft, dim, restaurant stew . Which meant cranking up the IS to 1600 and grabbing the shot with the lens zoomed to max. A problem with quarter frame sensors is that they generally make it hard to narrow the depth of field and consequently tossing the foreground and background distractions into soft focus is impossible.

So what to do with a wonderful image that's steeped in noise with a scatter of eye grabbing stuff littering the plane? Why Alien Skin's Bokeh of course. And PhotoShop's native lens flare filter to discipline the nasty light patterns. And, of course, a bunch of adjustment filters to wrestle the dynamic range away from a glaring tungsten cast toward a more intimate color temperature while holding onto the dark puddles of shadow.

Tammy's a photographer and graphic designer with a sensitive eye for detail. That's what I want to capture here. Not so much a photograph as a feeling about my friend. Wuddaya think.

Summer's Last

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Hmmm.... at first I just wanted to show my buddy Andreas Manessinger what he'd miss by postponing his US trip. We drove over to the Wellwood in Charlestown. That's in Maryland and the light you see reflected in the pitcher's flashing off of the Chesapeake Bay. Which is also wafting breezes across my half dozen bluepoint #1s. The pitcher was filled with Blue Moon, and would be soon again. It was about 5:30 on the deck and the sun was just starting to grow heavily golden over the water.

That's Bay Seasoning encrusted on the shells which is a salty/peppery mix. That explains the beer, huh?

But anyway... I got to wondering about this fantasy and thought to myself.... "Self. Why don't you see how cool this still life would feel all dressed up in oils?" So, well .... look at this wonderful mixed media.... Can't you smell the crabby steam that's shimmering upward? Which makes me wonder... which image works best? Thoughts?

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GEEK STUFF


About the thoughts? Here's some geek stuff for you. Pre Processing: captured by my Canon G10 in natural light at the Wellwood Restaurant in Charlestown, MD right beside the Chesapeake Bay. Post Processing:Well as you can see by this virgin image taken from my FlashCard... in the first image above, I did some cropping and enhanced the dynamic range with some intense tone mapping in CS4 with the juice-kicking power of TOPAZ (love those tools) which also allowed me to add lights and spot the blue points and beer with some drama. Oh yeah, there' s just a touch of AlienSkin's Bokeh filter around the edges to obscure some distractions. You thinkthis recipe works?

Then... then... in the second image I worked in AlienSkin's SnapArt2 with a medium brush in portrait.... later masking away the oil effect to spot the crabs. I can see either of these blown large on the wall of a restaurant.... lit with one lamp from above on an otherwise dark paneling. How elegant is that? Huh?

So? Wuddaya think?