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? 

Synerdipity

So, how do notions of clean and clutter interact? I mean, minimalists believe that less is more,while that’s me up there in the title image, wondering if more is less?Huh?

Clutter’s the quarry of minimalists and me. We both want to shrink a story to its essence. Yet I do the opposite of whatever minimalists do. Is there a word for the opposite of minimalist?

The thesaurus cranks out synonyms for minimalism like; essential, austere, basic, conservative, moderate, spare, stark, or unadulterated. While its opposites are; embellished, ornate, lavish, and outlandish.

Giants of photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson hunted Decisive Moments: instants when life’s parts lined up into a meaning. They stalked frames of evidence. Like life: Cartier-Bresson’s stories are intricate yet straightforward. But even with their complexities it’s wrong to think of his images as embellished or outlandish. His parts epoxy together. 

Look here at Bresson’s Rue Mouffetard  Paris. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Rue Mouffetard, Paris – 1952

Last sold for $43,750

Here’s a sense of time, place, culture, and feeling. It’s a novel squashed onto one frame. Genius!

It’s the whole of a concept that makes a meaning. To paraphrase Antonio Salieri’s wonder over discovering Mozart’s hand-written scores in the movie Amadeus, “There are NO corrections, deletions or additions: None!  Add or remove a single note and the entire masterpiece implodes. It is as if he takes dictation from God!” 

So? Is Cartier-Bresson a minimalist?

I’m re-reading Michael Freeman’s Fifty Paths To Creative Photography, (IIlex Press 2016), and he’s triggered me to think that life and art are all about, lining things up – where to put stuff. Unlike other artists who could move things where they wanted, before digital it was photographers who had to move around. While it’s still a good idea, now we can move life's furniture in post. 

To photographic digital-artists, just as they are to many drawing-artists, what comes out of a camera are reference-images. Many of my artist friends take a series of photo-sketches… that they lug back to clip beside their easels. Some are facial or body expressions, some mood impressions, while many lack the lighting that ignites feelings. Most are simply snapshots of stuff – their photo sketchbook. But they contain the essence of theme for the artist to extract a narrative by realigning the pieces into an inclination greater than the sum of these parts. Which of course is the essence of conceptual art.

Serendipity happens when you find valuable or agreeable stuff you weren’t looking for. Synergy happens when the sum is greater than its parts.  Squoosh the two together and it makes me imagine what Synerdipity might mean. Isn’t synerdipity what the artist does? An artist wills things to relate. 

Once at a party I came upon a pair of literature professors wondering if one could think without words. Distractions happened and I never heard their conclusion – Damn! Perhaps they could have inserted “symbols” for “words” so that they wondered if thought had to involve the symbolic: and that thinking was a matter of sculpting an angel from a stone made up of symbols? Do y’gotta’ have a pile of tangibles to arrange into something intangible? 

For the moment let’s forget that our Latin/Greek based languages  (the only ones I know enough about to make sweeping statements) are all substantially metaphoric at heart. You know that abstract reasoning is also called conceptual reasoning. It’s an ability to problem-solve by identifying patterns, logic and trends from new data, then to focus conclusions. IQ is an attempt to measure degrees of insightful (or useful) intelligence while EQ is a similar attempt to measure the usefulness of an individual’s emotional tools. Great creators in every field are generally high IQ & EQ. They can CQ (Conceptual Quotient) at astonishing levels. 

And CQ is a tool of synerdipity. With or without words, artists reveal patterns. Now, let me digress for a moment. 

Regardless of the complexity of their challenge: mathematicians and engineers seek elegance. Which means they abhor clutter. So does an artist’s concept. In his frame of evidence for my conclusion look again at Bresson’s Rue Mouffetard. Think again about Solieri’s  startled reactions to Mozart’s scores. Both those scores and Carier-Bresson’s decisive moments are elegant in the mathematical and engineering sense. They can be condensed no farther. 

Their frames are bursting with meticulous meaning without any of the embellished, ornate, lavish, or outlandish which thesaurus-makers say are the antonyms for the word minimalism. They contain only the essential, austere, basic, conservative unadulterated pattern of whole concepts. And yet while we have a word for minimalists there is none for their opposite.

Here're three examples of photographic-based art which I could never have accomplished in a wet darkroom.

Here, look first at a 2007 shot I grabbed when a street carnival opened in a small Lancaster park.

Air Chairs • Buchanan Park, Lancaster, PA • May, 2007

The reference image showed a Ferris Wheel’s empty cages juxtaposed against flashing lights and a grey rain-stained sky. But the final image brought those lights and carriages together into a surreal feeling backlit by impossible heavens. 

Second in complexity here is a 2013 Dublin street capture – well actually two snaps. The first one was of street facades which, upon close inspection, showed lingering ravages of the real estate collapse of 2008. See how these are X-ray buildings? You can look right though them as most of their floors were empty. The second, which I placed in the foreground involved a mother and pram against a poster’ed wall. This second of the two suggested hope which was now both placed in front of, yet walled off from, both the immediate and distant past.  Again matching the dynamic (and depth of field) range of these two disparate photo-sketches into this seamless collage was a darkroom impossibility: Synerdipity.

In Sunshine or in Shadow • Dublin, Ireland • May, 2007

And finally, look here at “Time Ravages All Roses” 

Time Ravages All Roses • Geo-Collage • May, 2007

Yeah, the reference pix were stark. The coffined background was captured in a Dublin mausoleum, while the taxidermy monkey stood years earlier on an antique shop’s dusty shelf in Beaufort, South Carolina.  I found the back wall beneath an Amsterdam bridge. 

Complexity grows among these three images. “Air Chairs” involves one reference image, “In Sunshine or in Shadow” two, and “Time Ravages All Roses” a bundle of stuff. But just as “Rue Mouffetard, Paris” demands all of its component pieces to complete its narrative, so too do the three images that follow. None of the reference images stood alone. It is their juxtaposition which adds sufficient detail to tell their stories. 

Mathematical elegance does not require fewer equations, but rather the fewest components to prove a premise.  I suggest that minimalism in conceptual fine art photography demands sufficient pieces to convey a unity of both complex thoughts and feelings. Which means adding stuff until (but not beyond) the narrative’s need for clarity. Which means that in conceptual fine art, more is necessary until the point is made elegantly. See what I mean? CQ is the tool of synerdipity.

With respect to conceptual art, more is frequently essential to make a Spartan point. Which brings me back to the question… If conceptual fine artists are not minimalists, then what are they called? Why is there no word that defines the opposite of minimalist: A word that compacts elegance, and irreducible meaning? Have you ever noticed that until there’s a word for something, it doesn’t exist? Take say, the internet”. Or how about feminism, cartoons, or fusion cuisine? Did electricity exist before it was named? How about econometrics, existentialism, or porn? 

Perhaps synerdipity’s the word for that which is definitely not Spartan, austere, spare or stark, yet not outlandish, decorous, ornate, lavish, or outlandish. Is the frame of evidence opposite to minimalist that carries none of those pejorative overtones synerdipidist?

 Just wrestling with the synerdipity of art, y’know?

Tell Me A Story • 4: Madonna

Race Against Racism runner(a)  • 4/30/17 • Lancaster, PA

Mysterious eyes. 

When color's surgically cut away, is there more or less identity... More or less story... More or fewer clues? I wonder: Do blind people understand others at a deeper or more shallow level? Is radio in anyway superior to video in communicating the depth of personalities? 

There's a resistance to digital post-processing, dismissing it as inauthentic. The word manipulation is the common verb that describes digital post work. I prefer augmentation, even revelation since manipulation sounds what? Dreary? Calculating? Callow? Shallow? Never mind that painters, for example, do nothing but manipulate... augment... reveal... the realities they imagine. Ditto poets, novelists, and composers. Can you imagine someone charging a symphonic composer of manipulation? Playwrights routinely manipulate the emotions of audiences, don't they? Is that a bad thing?

Yet somehow describing digital post processing as manipulation is dismissive, even insulting. But that's not my real point here. Those most likely to critique the idea of augmentative post processing argue that purity lies only in the image which comes out of the camera, right? Now I've written about pre-processing (lens choice, lighting constructs, filters, makeup, wardrobe, scenery, POV... and like that), and even what I guess you could call immediate processing involving the manipulation of panning, framing, and DOF. All of that manipulates what comes out of the camera. And that doesn't even begin to touch the things camera engineers have built in to manipulate sharpness, color and dynamic range, Etc. 

But none the less, purists who reject digital post processing as in-authentic have no memory of the wet darkroom where printmakers first selected among radically different developer chemistries/timings/heat, then chose between diffuser versus condenser enlargers, contrast/texture/pigment of papers/substrate, developer dynamics, hold-backs, burnings-in, solarizations, and on and on to create a one-of-a-kind final print, even in monotone. The opportunities to create one-off darkroom prints in color increased exponentially. The fact is that there never was a final print that was not processed heavily by at least the photographic artists and perhaps different darkroom technicians, and retouchers (both on the negatives and prints). 

Is all of this sounding defensive? Okay.... look at this:

Race Against Racism runner (b)  • 4/30/17 • Lancaster, PA

As I roamed the park next to my home here in Lancaster on the morning of this year's Race Against Racism run - I consciously looked for a series of faces to speak to you dramatically in monochrome.I could have set my Canon 7D to bleach away all color and make captures only in monochrome. Why do that? Why not allow all of the information possible to reveal narrative arcs? 

So first I processed this image above as a square (you'll note that this and the next images will all be square-cropped, since my Hasselblad days, that format's been a powerful challenge to me). And I processed it for the most haunting dynamic range and sculpting, adding a touch of glow to offset the overcast lighting of that morning. Then finally worked in monochrome to release the image at the start of this essay. 

But the geek-stuff all involves focusing powerful tools to carve out a narrative arc that allows the lady to tell her story. So, what is it? Once again, Tell Me A Story - THE story which you read from faces. I'm convinced that every street portrait needs to trigger at least  a short story - and perhaps a poem, novel, or epic. Hell, maybe even a sonata, if you won't accuse the composer of manipulating the notes - or the mysterious eyes :-)

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.

PrintCrafting 2:

Katelynn's Six! Christmas 2015 - The print

Okay, all sorts of challenges are wift-ing out of the PrintCraft project process. And most of them are looking back at you in Katelynn's Six! up there. It perfectly matched every nuance of what I saw on my monitor... AFTERWARD! Uh-huh seems I used Adobe 1998 as my primary color work space as I worked on this image in Photoshop. And I was pretty happy with the result...

Catelynn's 6!: The Original

And since I worked on this on my carefully calibrated iMac monitor. And I tested this image on my iPhone, iPod, and a couple of Mac Pros. They all showed me that image immediately above.The colors are subtly but DISTINCTLY different from the "The Print" at the start of this essay (BlogEssay?). 

So, where'd the ethereal light come from in the print? Unintentionally it seems. Because in converting the image for print on my new Epson P-800, I used the profile for the printer and Epson's Premium High Gloss paper. And POOF! the colors shifted. When I did the hard proofs, the images both at 4X6" and 8X11.5 were exactly matched to the print version at the top. 

Now... It's important that WYSIWYG happens. Important? No - critical. So, now that I can match the monitor to the paper, I need to match the monitored image to the printer, not a capricious gamma shift. As you can see I've not even bought 13X19" or 19X24" sheets. In fact, I'm still holding onto the Epson super premium paper sampler I got with the printer. In the interim I've been popping out 4X6" tests with a final 8X11.5" of each on that premium high gloss double weight. Best way to test the sparkle, right?

Last post handled the color space differently and the colors of that row-block in Lancaster were almost spot on the monitor. Almost. That's why I redid all of the color management settings and, well, I opened with the result. Once again, even though the gamma shift was unexpectedly dramatic, it did give me an image that was completely transferrable to the paper. 

So, I think this tells me that I need to start my images in the final color space. But that looks to mean that I have to understand in advance... at the very inception of pulling an image from the FlashCard.... have to understand the paper upon which I shall finally print it.

That cannot be correct. Do you think about that when you capture images? The paper upon which you might finally print the image? 

So, while a lot's getting better, this looks like a project that will fill productive hours yet. But that's what a hobby's about, right? And in this case I'm learning from the books, essays, and videos of world class experts (who apparently also have editors who know all about  communicating. 

BTW--- GEEK STUFF:I handheld my Canon 7D with an EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens cranked all the way out. And the fill lights were table lamps, the primary light was from the TV monitor Katelynn was watching. Which meant cranking the ISO to 16,000. That, of course either cursed the final image, or flattered it through a gentle shower of noise. I grew up with Kodak's Tri-X as the goto film It shot at 300ASA, but everybody cranked it up 4 or 5 stops. Which meant that grain gave images their authenticity. It was a wonderful texture. 

Uganda: It's Wealth

Uganda has Africa's highest birth rate. The population about doubles each decade. That's a problem that also makes it the youngest nation on that continent, and perhaps the world. There is apparently a law in the country. I mean, there must be. There must be legislation forbidding ugly people from leaving their homes. Here's what I mean… (click on an image to expand it, K?)

Doesn't every girl want a big brother like this?

These are farmers and families of the Village of Mytiana, Uganda.

And here's their teacher.

A REAL Photograph?

Click On The Image

It’s called by some
The Simple Life
What the Amish have.

On a Summer day
Riding Lancaster’s
Backroad farmland hills

I wonder if simple
Captures what it means
To live here like this?

Hmmm… Some have wondered if I still take “pictures”? I’m guessing they mean, photographs? In fact friends wonder if I can still take pictures? Okay… here are the basics, right? It looks like a picture, a photo… um… don’t you think? Of course, nothing is reeeeely as it looks, is it? :-)

Near Blue Ball, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Canon G10, PS4 (pano w/image merge 4 wide-angle pans), custom brushes

NOTE Okay... maybe I did move the barn, um, into the image, uh, along with its cow and pasture. But... but.. it's still a picture, right? And well, perhaps there were only a few of those orange flowers snapping open, but.. but.. well, there should have been more, huh? And yeah, the skyline could have been messed up with a few inconvenient buildings off in the distance. Well who has an appetitie for inconvenience anyway? Not me... nope. But... but... except for those tiny details and a tad of romanticizing the dynamic range and color palette... HEY... basically it's a photograph, huh?

OILY - A Tutorial

NOTE: all images in this posting can be enlarged by clicking upon them....

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How about some tutorial? Or comparison? Or review? Or - wuddever of what I was up to here. Let me type out some thoughts about the what and why of this image of my grand-niece Katelyn Rose.

You'll recall I raved about the quality of low-light images that come from the Canon 7D, even at 3400 ISO. Well, that's not the case with the Canon G10.

A touch of background. The G10 is Canon's 'professional' point-and-shoot. It allows full override of all automatic controls, plus unlike any other point and shoot I could find, it has an optical range finder as well as a real-time LCD. So when the sun is at your back - washing away the LCD preview - the viewfinder does the job. It's a terrific camera, and just about pocket sized - if you have a generous pocket. The G10 has a quarter frame sensor coated with 14.7 mega-pixels (MP).

Which is a LOT of pixels for a small camera. Previously the Canon G9 had 12.1 MP, and the bump up in these things in the G10 was Canon's attempt to ratchet onward in the sensor-size wars. OOOPS! Since the camera has a quarter frame sensor the smaller pixels just do not take as large a sample of the light falling upon them. Which leaves more room for error... and error turns into what appears to be grain- which we all noise. In fact, Canon's brought out the G11 with just 10 MP! What? About 20% fewer than its G9 and double the reduction over the G10? Why? They installed a bigger computer chip to allow the larger pixels to do a lot more. In fact, more, but smaller, MPs - beyond some point in low light - actually seem to increase noise, decrease tonal range, and add little sharpness. To be sure, the G!0 is wonderful at ISO settings up to 800, but beyond that those hailstones grow bigger.

Now I took this photograph at 1600 ISO with the G10.

The lighting was lovely, though dim coming principally from a windowed patio door to the left on a very gray winter afternoon. The fill light was tungsten from various table lamps. No flash or artificial fill was used. Okay, take a look at this blowup of the details of her face from that un-retouched photo... See: A hailstorm of grain makes the image almost unacceptable.

Now, I've recently seen ads from the Topaz Labs (http://www.topazlabs.com/) for their Topaz DeNoise 5 (http://www.topazlabs.com/denoise/) filter. Okay, I really like Topaz filters. For a reasonable outlay the one I own, Topaz Adjust (http://www.topazlabs.com/adjust/) is robust and totally productive. "So," I says to myself, "Self... what if you use Topaz DeNoise 5 on images shot at higher ISOs with your Canon G10? Might that not compensate and turn the G10 into a real competitor for the 7D at lower light levels?"

Which led me to download the thirty day trial version of Topaz 5 and apply it to this image of Katelyn. Here... What do you think of the same expanded area after it was cranked through Topaz 5?

Surely there is considerably less apparent grain, but the skin tones look a bit as if they were in a thin plastic film. Still, with some adjustment layer tweaking of the dynamic range, the result can be turned very easily into this.... Which is good enough for government work, huh? But... but... Well, the image lacks the lighting of the grand masters, and has, of course a ton of distractive background through no fault of the G10. Fine... now onto the diddling to suck out the good stuff from this image.

And that's where I turned to my AlienSkin filters - three of them in fact. First I popped Katelyn out of the image and copied her to another layer above this original. Then I copied the original image to a new layer to which I applied the AlienSkin :Bokeh filter and masked it back in around her to throw those pesky distractions out of focus. Then I applied AlienSkin's SnapArt: oil filter to that carefully blurred backgroung image to create an oil painted background. Finally I applied the SnapArt:watercolor filter to Katelyn's image on the upper level - and went back to allow each of them to carefully fit together. To these I added some adjustment levels to mask in appropriate areas of shadowing, vignetting, and tonal range to the introudctory image way up there atop this posting... and I added an additional custom green screen on a higher level which I blended with an overlay adjustment to suggest a warm Rembrandt mood.

So? Think at me. I think the G10's a pretty good backup for the big apparatus - Comments? Does Topaz DeNoise 5 save the G10 at the higher ISO?

Show Poster

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I've been invited to do two shows: one at a gallery, another in a grand public mansion.

Frankly, I dunno if I have another show in me. It is so much work. And they are expensive. I figure I'll need at least twenty prints carefully mounted and probably framed. And perhaps one or two will have to be of a large size. And for what? It was a terrific ego trip to do my last show a couple of years ago. And there were hundreds of people who passed through. Lots of them were friends who were previously unaware of my closet interest in photographic imagery. But, I'm not a professional. I make very little money from my work. I've not submitted to Canon's annual in the past two years. And as you can see from this blog, I've cut back my posting to about six a month or so. Oh, I've got a lot of images I haven't posted in a private stash. But overall, my art is an escape from the rewarding work I do in my day job.

Sooo.... to show or not to show? Or is this blogsite that's viewed by hundreds of people a month enough of a show? Heck, I still haven't repaired all the damage to this site caused by Apple's cancelation of my website service (see Rotten Apple in the column up there on the right for an explanation).

The larger show could be as early as December, but I don't think I want to rush all of that work in the next four or so weeks. Suggestions anyone?

ON THE OTHER HAND....

I am almost out of business cards for this blogsite. Maybe instead of poster for a show, this might make a useful image, full-bleed, for that card? Again, thoughts?

Testing Narrow DOF

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Fortunately I have this virgin image (direct from my FlashCard) of a cooperative model who I got to stand outside of the gym against a corrugated red tin wall on the anniversary of his first full year of dieting and training (July 9, 2010). This secluded side of the building was in shade with the main indirect sunlight coming right to left. There was an unpainted cement wall off to the left which acted as a natural reflector. All of the light sources were natural and sufficiently bright at 6:14AM on a July morning to allow a low ISO (200). In other words, perfect conditions to capture a tack sharp image with max Depth OF Field (DOF), particularly from some 15 feet away from the model.

The goal here on my fifth test of the beta version of Bokeh2 is much more modest than the former playful attempts to use it as a stand-alone graphic device. Now I'm looking at its ability to compliment an image without imposing itself upon the viewer. I wanted to make it as invisible as possible to simulate the natural DOF of a long lens opened to it widest aperture. To that end I cropped the original layer and used PS4's content aware scale to turn the image into a horizontal. Of course I eliminated distracting imperfections in the tin wall behind the model.

Why a horizontal? Well the original is a snapshot with the model standing dead-center almost up against the red corrugated surface. So this altered composition applies the rule of thirds to powerfully draw attention to the key subject.

Okay, now I duplicated the cropped layer and then opened that duplicate in the Bokeh2 filter. There I simply chose from the preset lenses simulated in the application and picked the Canon 300mm f/2.8L@f2.8. I rendered the new layer, masked it, then painted away the blur over the model.

From there I duplicated the visible onto a new layer and using an adjustment curves layer, reconfigured the dynamic range of the image to emphasize the highlights in the wall while darkening its shadows. Again, I masked out the model. Which was pretty much the entire operation (except for a couple of sharpening steps of course).


Finished Image & Geek Data:
Camera: Canon 7D, Lens Canon EF-S 17-85mm, Focal Length 47mm, Aperture f/5.4, 1/80sec, ISO 200.
Processed: PS4, Bokeh2

Bokeh2-Part 2

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Let's try Bokeh2 with a tad of help from SnapArt2 shall we? Note, I took a passel of pix of KatelyinRose last Saturday with my G10, point-and-shoot. That meant shooting at a high and noisy ISO. So, what to do? Well, I'd intended to use the images as a test of the new Bokeh2 in combo with PS4 and knew as a consequence that noise would be no problem. See what I mean?

Comments?

1Mpxl Phone Cheepo Again

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Another from Friday night. I'm thinking that a lot of folks have gone out and bought Hulga cameras. Those are plastic film cameras that look like 1950s Kodak snapshot boxes.They're so shoddily made that light leaks onto the film and the crappy plastic lenses have all sorts of imperfections so that the final images seem like spiritual vomit. People look at the results and go, "Heavy Man! Soooooo DEEEEEP!" And I try not to put my finger down throat.... GAG!


They also expect that the point and clicker (as opposed to a photographer) will go through the hassle of sending 12 shot film rolls off to a lab somewhere and wait for "instant gratification" when the prints arrive a week or so later.

BUT why go Hulga when most of you, like me, are carting around 1mpxl cameras in our cellphones that come equipped with super crappy plastic lenses? And of course we've smeared those openings with all sorts of finger grease each time we use the phones. Nothing like random grease on plastic to smear highlights delightfully into shadows. And the result?

"HEAVY MAN! RANDOM! and Sooooooo DEEEEEEP!"

Huh?

+++

Like yesterday's post the image was captured just after the sun set through my Verizon LG. Question... why have I spent bundle on cameras and glass when all the while I was carting around this portal into the mystical world? It's a puzzlement don't you think.

Anybody want me to do a cellphone wedding shoot? I shall charge TOP PRICE for my ethereal interpretation.

Take note Andreas Manessinger :-)

The Best Camera In The World

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The best camera, they say, is the one that you have with you.

My cellphone is Verizon's cheapest, clamshell thing. It has a 1Mpx camera and a plastic lens. But it's usually in my pocket. Have you ever heard them tell, "It's not the arrow, it's the indian."? Last night I only had my cheepo cell phone with me as the sun set.

Box PIle

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Jay Maissel - "Black and white is an inside joke with no reference to reality. Color approximates reality, gets more of the feeling of what's there."

Arthur Miller - "Create the poem from the evidence."

****

New York, New York
Canon G10
PS4 & Topaz & touches of Alien Skin Snap Art 2: Oil Paint

Flowers Are Boooring?

SIMPLY PRETTY

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The thing about flowers is that… Well you know what a “gimmee” is in golf? They are given free to us as artists. They are so beautiful… almost achingly so, that it is as if we are cheating by making images of them. They are both simple and pretty… “Simply Pretty”.

And they are so difficult at the same time. I have a similar problem with gorgeous people. Their very perfection leaves me so little artistic room to maneuver. How do I add anything to the stunning presence of those flowers up above? What is left for my artistic muse? I become a reproducer… a copier…. a…a… a… plagiarist.

If I took something like that in my day job… and reproduced it in an article… I’d get sued for appropriating the idea/work of someone else. And yet… yet…

Haven’t you noticed that there are things which are like magnets to our lenses? Trains pull at our cameras along with sun sets/rises, children… and… and.. FLOWERS!

So of course I can’t help myself. But when they are done… and the image sits there smiling back… So simple… so pretty… So Simply Pretty… I want to share it, but not take credit for it. Because what I see there is something for which I have very little credit. What I see there is awesome, moving, and some higher source’s gimmee.

BTW, there are artists who can express their personal wonder through their floral still lifes. I think of April Siegfried's stunning studio studies. Hers are NOT merely slavish reproductions. Not boooooring. See, it's not so much flowers that I find booooring. Or images of them... It is the fact that I lack the imagination to do more than reproduce nature's gimmee.

Sigh…

Tyranny

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In his temple, President Jefferson is stood to stare at his motivation... at the concept which ignited him to explode through history with a republic answer to the arbitrary collection of power into few hands. And now as it's being recollected at the direction of the legislature and executive offices his pen imagined... recollected into the pens of nine court justices, one wonders at the irony of Jefferson's enforced gaze. Or how his legacy has come loose from his idea.

Societies are made up of people. People age and die. Why not their cultures? I wonder if Jefferson's temple will survive his ideas? By how long? In Rome I saw churches and buildings built from stone that was quarried from the marble of the ancients' buildings. How do you think they will repurpose Jefferson's stones after they realize that his image and that word are no longer joined, even in memory?

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In the 1960s I remember that black and white was considered to be the most faithful way to present reality. And that was accepted even though black and white is inherently abstract, stealing away as it does an entire dimension of reality. Then came the 90s and the color dams exploded allowing the deeply felt component of its hues to add an emotional dimension to photographed reality that b&W just couldn't tap.

And now the digital artist can drop away the reaity almost entirely to distill out the underlying layer of feeling itself. It is a wonderful time to have photographic skills.

TAH-DAH! – The Canon 7D

It snowed in Lancaster this weekend. 24"! So I walked my new Canon 7Doutside as it was tailing off and peered South along North Lime Street. That's my home there to the left. And here's the original.. first picture I took with the new camera. It's about 11am on Saturday morning.



And it shows that I made a mistake! For my purposes, the camera does NOTHING that my 40D could not do. There was absolutely NO reason for me to have shelled out hundreds of bucks more for this machine. More pixels? Well, yeah, but lots of new noise as well. Bigger blow up or more cropping options? Okay, but the 40D allowed me all that I wanted. The 7D images are hair less contrast (flatter) than the 40D - and simply don't pop as dramatically without a lot of post processing work. The camera will do, but I can't recommend it. Instead... buy a used 40D, or consider the Canon 50D.

Now... what about the sort of images that I finally enjoy producing? Okay... look at this...



As you can see, the 7D image allows me a bunch of information so that postprocessing techniques bite well. Frankly, I'm disappointed. I'd hoped for more vibrance and a greater tonal range and can't find them in the new images. Oh, it does allow video. And yeah, that's one of the reasons I wanted the thing for our Peruvian trip. But now that the trip's been postponed until at least next OCTOBER.... well I've got an option that I probably won't play with until this summer. By then who knows, perhaps there will be some super sales on the 7D and I would have saved some money... or maybe by then my lust for the new machine would have gone flaccid?

Oh well... I own it and it's no worse than the 40D. It wasn't a step backward... But forward? Nah....