Grab - Puerto Madryn, Argentina Duo

1. Free carousel on the Puerto Madryn, Argentina beach.

So it's possible that art's about memories? That memories are the ultimate filter? 

But memories go goofy. Lots of people, like me, rarely dream in color. Something sucks away everything but shades of grey. Which is like emotional liposuction. Hmmmm.... Invented in 1983, the prefix to the word... "lipo" comes from the Greek word "lipos" for fat.

What's it mean to surgically remove all but various shades of one color? Is only fat gone? Or has the operation become... profound? While I've got color-blind cousins, I see what I call colors. And you do the same, right? So removing all but say, B&W shades strips away...? Is it possible, in any way, to do an accurate picture of anything without some commonly accepted agreement over the identity of say red from green? Green from blue? And all of what our brain defines of every gradation resulting from any possible mixture of RG and B?

Is all black and white representation... illustration... as opposed to say, photography?

Are your non-color dreams photography or illustration? Are your conscious memories, for that matter. photographic? Or are they something else each time you take them out for review? Tried another way... Is the mere act of "remembering" a... in photographic terms... a lossy process? Like jpeg images, they suffer a loss of information each time they are compressed and recompressed, and... 

2. Free carousel on the Puerto Madryn, Argentina beach.

Of course memories are filtered through a lossy screen each time they're examined... and they have a shelf-life problem even in their storage bins. Who can argue that their images are "representational" in any sense in the face of infinite contrary evidence? At best our memories are illustrative. And to the degree that we assemble them to draw conclusions - which after all is what art does - well,,,

Note that word, "draw". We're back to sucking. Huh? To draw is to what? To represent something with tools, words, or such. Or to pull something out. I can draw blood from your vein, draw gold from its vein, or draw a conclusion. But, a conclusion from whom?

Say what? Well do these two images draw any conclusions from you? About what? Or have I drawn conclusions that I'm representing in either one or the other of these images? Representing to whom? Me? You? 

Are we each sucking on the same story vein? Does color liposuction cause us to draw... different conclusions, me with my tools, you with from your own emotional vein? 

Are either of these images illustrations of reality? Or has the lossy process of art sucked away enough of the sculptor's stone that maybe a goofy angel gets released? Sigh... 

Enough questions for a crisp November night? 

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.

Abruptly Dieter Understood

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When the ancient safe was cracked there was only the letter. Vaguely it hinted of treasure. Hidden? Buried? Lost?

Lost.. except the letter spoke of “the hand’s lifeline.”

What? Every hand has a line, right? RIGHT?

For year’s he searched the old city of Lancaster. Almost giving up until the shot barely missed him.

Why? Was there something? Where was someplace still as old as that letter? Only site still exposed… St. James… It’s cemetery older than the Revolution… Older than the country.

Where? Was there a life line somewhere on one of the buried… buried…. hands?

Hands?

Lines?

He stopped, stared… and abruptly Dieter understood…

Canon 7D, PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, Oilpaint, Various custom brushes and filters.

The Line's End

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She still stands there waiting
A whistle or smoke,
She still stands there waiting
Her lines thronged with folk.

But her tracks now are rusting
With weeds grown to choke
Off the chance to leave searching
For dreams that aren’t broke.
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New Columbia, PA
Canon 40D/Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5): PS4/Topaz, AlienSkin:SnapArt2, Watercolor, Custom brushes/textures (Thanks, Distressed Jewel)

New Hope

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For some New Hope
Is a place where
There is an
Expectation

On the part of
Some that they will
Not ever need
To conform to

What others think
That they have to
Do with their lives
Filled with new hope.

Canon 40D: PS4, AlienSkin:SnapArt: Topaz, Lucis Filters, custom brushes.

New Hope canal, New Hope, Pennsuylvania

Martini - Shaken

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I stood above
Chris’s Lotus.
And I
Realized
How heat…
Rises.
Canon 7D: PS4, Tabletop, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, Colored Pencils, Custom: Textures & Brushes

Terrible Frozen Beauty

Pacem In Terra

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And away they all flew
Like the down of a thistle...

But I heard him exclaim
Ere he drove out of sight,

"Merry Christmas to all,.
And to all A GOOD NIGHT."

We're at a moment of worry with respect to things economic, with a real possibility that a gale of creative destruction will whip through our places in 2011. We face a moment of challenge which this time I hope will see, as that gale recedes.... Pacem In Terra.

Which is truly the hope we have been waiting for.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Ted

SIZZZZZLE!

<- Borrowed my friend Chris's Bugatti last Sunday and took it to Musser Park nearby to my home here in Lancaster. Wanted to pop this beast out of the rich lighting. I'm not a MotorHead. But the art of design makes me twitch. And the Veyron ... well now this is one manly beast! And probably a chick magnet, huh?


GEEK STUFF Here's Chris's Bugatti Veyron shot with my Canon 70D through the Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) in macro mode. Post processing happened with CS/PS4 • Topaz • AlienSkin Bokeh, AlienSkin SnapArt/Water Color • Custom Brushes • Custom Textures all upon a background captured one night in Intercourse, PA.

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Chill breeze puffs
The day before a
First frost
Crackles summer
Away with
The boat for
Winter.

GEEK STUFF: Chesapeake Bay, MD. • Canon 20D: Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5), PS/CS4, Topaz, AlienSkin/SnapArt/Watercolor, Custom strokes, textures, brushes, filters.

Thanks Flo

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Yesterday I uploaded a couple of images that I put together for a friend's jazz group. Take a look at Flo's comments. They were as precisely good as advice gets. The things needed more grit and smoky-jazzy feel. She pointed out that the guys were dressed oddly for jazz. That the drum's backlight was distracting. That It probably needed some wording. She wondered why I straightened the original image when the original cockeyed shot gave it more presence. Yep... all terrific comments. Which sent me back to the beginning... as it should have... Even the typeface I'd chosen wasn't JAZZY enough. And the text colors, while cool as that drum, weren't hot. And even cool jazz is HOT!

Right? Of course right.... Here's take 2. Comments? Lemme know.

Barn Wall

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Wandering around north county. In a barn there were some old pictures hanging on the wall. Discolored, faded... you know. Found some water damage but this one was under glass in its frame. Fun to watch it pop back out.

The D70's got a great processor in the dim florescent light. Great capturing color balance in the auto white mode. Oh yeah... I did cheat and add a texture screen and diddled in both Topaz and Alien Skin's Snap art. And, um, maybe I usedCS4's warp tool to create more of a 3D feeling. Okay...okay... I repainted the colors and altered the palette to make the feeling explode. And yeah, I warmed up the exposure a bunch.

But other than that... nada!

Fun, huh?

Triptych Against Racism

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I think this was the twelfth race against racism last Saturday. 3,300 runners entered. They close N. Lime Street in front of my home for registration and the starting line's the next block down. Someone said it's a 5K race. Since I never ran one of those things, and certainly don't know my Ks from my Ms... well.

The racers were determined. To run, and to make it clear that they were against racism. Odd thing though. It took a lot of looking among the 3,300 people to find runners whose race wasn't caucasian. And most seemed to have come in from the suburbs for the event. I didn't see any of my African-American or Hispanic city neighbors from around these blocks among the crowd. The male winners though were from Ghana.

There are four or five African guys every year who are running-gypsies, moving from prize-money-run to prize-money-run all around this country. Hard life, huh? No one asks them for their green cards. They just outdistance everyone else, collect the prize money and leave town... on to the next. Is there an irony there for the Race Against Racism idea? Not sure...

What do you think?

Stormy April

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There's a storm overtaking the capitol. Things have prematurely hottened. One senses that the world's oldest democracy is hunching its shoulders against a series of thuds. It's as if the air's charged with static sharp enough to sting like spitting dust as you lurch into the headwinds of a maelstrom.

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Once again in this series, I'm working through the challenge of mid-day glare, on a summer hot afternoon. Impressionism? Well, yeah.

Teasing Baby

Hmmmm….. some interest in the mechanics of yesterday’s post. Folks want a how-to. I’m not much good at demos… but lemme try.

First off the challenge here was plucking an idea from a snapshot from my G10 on Christmas day and turning it into a feeling I could communicate. Fortunately the Canon G10 packs more than 14 mpxls into a snapshot allowing a bunch of information that leaves room to crop away as much as thirty percent of an image and still have sufficient material to allow traction in post processing. BTW…. I used an ISO of 400 to avoid introducing too much noise…. The downside of the G10's densely packed mpxls.

As you can see in the full frame capture in Image One… the lighting was contrasty tungsten which needed a bunch of adjustment in Adobe’s Camera Raw application. Fortunately I used a gray scale swatch in the first of this series to allow easy color balance.

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IMAGE 1

I used the auto rotate function of PS4 to rotate the image as shown by the arrows in the corners. Then I did a crop to get rid of the mass of confusion around the chair as I’ve shown with the orange squiggles. But even with tight crop, there was still a lot left to compete for the eye, when Katelynn Rose was clearly the subject. And the confusion was not just in a cacophony of shapes but also of palette and light. Sooooo…. I've suggested the final crop with the white outline in Image 1 and that's what you see below in Image 2.

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IMAGE 2

Now to get down to mood. With adjustment layers I saw that I had to not only create some mysterious drama but also burn away most heavily in areas 1 – 4. However, since I wanted to allow supporting visual interest in those four areas: How to do that yet not provide sufficient information to quarrel with the main story of the baby? Alien Skin’s Bokeh of course. After changing the over-all dynamic range with curves adjustment layers (six I believe carefully masking them in to different elements of the final image) I flattened the image, copied the layer… and applied Bokeh to it. Masked it away, then brushed back the creamy results into the four problem areas above and to a lesser extent to any of the chair’s fabric which continued to distract attention while introducing a dreamy sense consistent with the child's nap.

None of this is particularly challenging, but it’s all a matter of applying the right tool to the proper area to tease out the feeling I visualized when I took the photograph.

Does this transition from snapshot to moody image help anyone? Hope so….

Happy New Year….

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?

Eureka!

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Ever noticed how scientists are ashamed of epiphany? Read a scientific paper and you will never find the words, "And at this point in the procedure we abruptly realized that Dr. Skinny had accidentally spit into the solution and that his saliva added a stimulus to the precipitate that overcame the impasse resulting in the miracle hair restoration break through."

Nope, read their stuff and Point A results eventually in Point Z through a well planned process that never veers from the genius of the scientific team. Of course Point Q was probably Dr. Skinny's spittle, but the report fails to account for epiphany that emerges during the process.

Visual artists are not scientists. See this first image? I wanted to apply my new interest in AlienSkin's SnapArt to some images I'd taken at Pigeon Point Light on the California Coast. And I thought it'd be cool to create an illustration featuring my feelings about the light.

And then a funny thing happened along the way to creating that image up there.... This happened! BOING! I discovered that SnapArt's oil painting options allowed me to swirl thick strokes to compliment an idea I had when I dramatized the original photograph with Topaz3. I'm thinking of it as Doctor Skinny's spittle...


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And the virgin image that started, or startled, my imagination? Here's what my Canon 20D saw through its EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5).

Cape May In August

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Cape May's a city that hangs on New Jersey's southern point. A piece of it faces the ocean, another piece the bay. And between the two edges sit Victoria's houses. Something about the deliberate way people present their homes hits my illustrator button. The town's pieces look like magazine covers, don't you think?

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Hey... now you can follow me on Twitter!! Tweet me at http://twitter.com/Editor_Ted

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And here's sort of the virgin image, well seven images... pulled from my FlashCard and stitched together in PhotoShop. It should be easy to see where I went from here, right? Not sure if you'd call this assembled images pre or post processing, but they're what my Canon EOS 40D saw through its Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5). After this assembly I cropped, then warped it into acceptable shape. Of course there's extensive tone mapping then both Topaz and Alien Skin's SnapArt finished the job.

The Race Is Over #6 & #7

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I sense by the traffic to this site that this Race Against Racism series may have imposed itself beyond your tolerance. Okay, so let me end it with a fireworks display.. K? Out of the six images that I haven't yet posted these two were always intended to be the final act. The blazing rockets. I love each of them. But then, I'm a sentimental mush-ball when it comes to image making. I just can't seem to reach in and pull out the dark stuff. Maybe there isn't any darkstuff? Hmmmm... gotta think on that since darkstuff seems to be what critics want artists to do, right?

Okay, I will think on how to make gritty statements about the human condition's inevitable overheating of the earth, inhumanity toward one another, tendencies toward senseless savageries, and of course its trigger for wars and ancient obsessions for revenge. Sigh...



But before I go off to do dat... Howzabout we ponder these last two images- the end of this posted series - together. Yeah, they're sweet enough to make your teeth fall out... so clamp them tightly together... hopefully in a smile? K?

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Tech stuff? As before the photos came first through my mighty Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens onto the 40D's processor. I used Topaz, and the AlienSkin Bokeh + SnapArt filters to tease out the thematic style that held this series together. If you'll click on the word IMAGEFICTION in the masthead way up above, you should be able to scroll down and look at others in this series along with the virgin photographs that I pulled directly from my FlashCards. Questions about technical details for this series? Leave them in the comments, or like most people, drop me an email to the address you'll find in the column there on the upper right. Hope you've enjoyed this series as much as I have making it.

Poster #3

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Every culture adds to a city's mosaic - and each lives among the markings of past cultures. Cool thing is that environment evolves... you know: the streets, signs, walks, buildings, institutions... Hard things. But they change so much more slowly than the culture. Well except after catastrophes like war or nature. But I digress...

See the culture of the moment is aswirl with new ideas, feelings, colors, and sounds. Soft stuff. And those curl and wipe up against the hard things. Which is what makes cities so damned much fun where the soft mash up against the hard.

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And here's the virgin image pulled from the FlashCard (which you can click on).
Once again I'm playing with a bunch of neat stuff. First the mighty Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens was perfect for wandering around Musser Park during the race. Then I brought the twin AlienSkin filters to bear Bokeh to cream up the ... well... bokeh, and then SnapArt for the painterly pop-ability. Once again they help give the Race Series a common style. Like it?