Just Off Nantucket

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From boat-deck.

August, Summer, Hot, Night.

Canon, 7D, Canon EFS 17-85 (f4-5.6), PS4: AlienSkin: SnapArt3, Impasto, custom brushes.

Hope Hardens

Angels pardon
Until they’re staid
Then hope hardens
Then dreams fade.

Have you noticed that regardless of its profundity, an idea clearly – unambiguously – rendered is likely to be dismissed as a banal cliché? Critics cherish ambiguity…

Images… Backyard fantasy light, Lancaster, Pa. 2011

Canon 7D, PS4: Custom textures, AlienSkin Bokeh2 to simulate Canon 50mm f/1.2 @f/1.2, AlienSkin: Exposure 4, Agfachrome 1000 RS, Custom watercolor soft bristle brushes & point-pop texture sharpening,

AlienSkin Demo

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The folks at AlienSkin have asked me to test a number of the pieces of their wonderfully integrated family of filters. The most recent I received is Exposure4 which allows me to mimic the grain/dynamic range of dozens of classic B&W and polychrome films. I've also recently received their powerful upgraded version 3 of SnapArt. Previously I showed you how their BlowUp allows a virtual artist to grow the size of an image with minimal degradation.

So, I grabbed an image I took at at the historic Landis Valley Farm Museum with a 3Mpxl LC cellphone. Then I worked it through the faded Polaroid pre-sets in Exposure3, augmented it farther into a pastel in SnapArt3, then finally blew the small image up 150% in BlowUp3. About ten minutes of work from open in PS4 through posting here.

Here's the virgin image.... So? Whuddaya think?

Antalya to Konya

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Somewhere in the hills
Of Turkey lies
The debris
Of wandering
Civilizations.

Turkey well on the road to Konya from Antalya. Canon 7D, PS4: custom textures, AlienSkin: SnapArt3: Crayon, custom brushes. My classic Ford truck.


Of course that's my cool desktop TOY1931 classic Ford Model Aclassic, right?

NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT?



Here's my first experiment with the all new Topaz Adjustment5: Dusk. Whuddayaa think?

Para & Noid & Noid

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Was the room random?
Was the night darker?
Was the world hidden?
Were the watchers un-
Bidden?

Is alone ever
Where a man can be?
Or is the night just
A place where watchers
Spy in?

The thing about para-
Noia is that you
Must have secrets which
Are worth the big costs
Which make them way im-
Portant.

There are more para-
Noids than there exist
Secrets that are worth
The costs of their sur-
Veillance.

Pity…

Canon 7D, PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, Oil Painting, Custom: filters & Brushes.
NY, NY

Suppose...

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Suppose that sky
Met the water
Exactly where
A barn
Met them
Both…
Once upon a time.

West Dennis, MA – at high tide, low cloud and old barn.

Canon 7D: Canon EF-S 10-22mm, PS4: Topaz, Alien Skin: SnapArt2, Custom filters & brushes.

Storm

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When the heavens open in the tropics - it's as if the air abruptly becomes solid.

OMG The Baby's Playing With it!

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Not a good idea to let kids play with the dollar. It'll break.

Swatch

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Imagination opens a big door
And shows us what's
Inside.

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NYNY
Canon G10
PS4/Topaz/AlienSkin-SnapArt2-Oil/Custom Brushes

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We've Been Walloped!

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Watched the vital signs today. Saw the world's financial markets wobbling. Watched the Euro's value reflect the astonishing amount of sovereign debt that EU countries will have to refinance over the next three months (who's left to buy?). Winced when the May US employment figures came in at disastrous levels and the unemployment rates declined only because large lumps of the American workers became so discouraged that they abandoned seeking work. Yeah, the way BP keeps pissing into the Gulf, and how Obama's "taking charge" by talking tough about that company's advertising and dividend payments - tough about things that will do nothing about the gunk vomiting up under the sea. Yeah, that's melancholic static.

But this is small stuff. The reeeely scary news came earlier in the week and the word's only just digesting the kernel of universal instability it revealed. Forget the trembling Middle East, pirates off of Africa, or the sabers rattling in Iran and North Korea. No... no... ultimately the most unsettling announcement... The one that makes us wonder if we can believe in any human decision... That news hit us with real wallop when we learned of the breakup between Al and Tipper.

Is there nothing solid left? Is it all dissolving?

Outted

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Of course the house is out. What house isn't.... out? So, why do they name this one out? As opposed to what? An in house? Unless an in house is one imagined by a hot designer. Like... like a painter, director, actor, or singer who is... in. On the other hand... in is an anachronism. Nothing is older than old slang. Well, yeah. There is something older.

Something that no one wants any part of anymore.

"What?" you ask? "What will no one have anything to do with?"

Why... an out house, Right?

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40D - 17-85mm: f16@1/500sec ISO 400; Topaz & SnapArt2 all enhanced in PS: CS4

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This image got lost when Mac took down my website. I thought I'd post it again here, because I like. Is that reason enough?

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.

She Writes In Color

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Quietly there perched on the column she wrote swirls of thoughts and feelings. Jefferson's monument does that. Or the classical grandeur of the building's sweep makes your thoughts swirl through your feelings mixing together toward conclusions that are personal as your dreams.

"Have you visited the Pantheon," I heard her ask her friend. And of course it was clear what she meant. This building was imagined a couple of millennia ago by a Roman who put his name across its arch ("Agrippa LF Costertium Fecit" Agrippa Costertium made this). Coming to the Jefferson is returning... to the Pantheon, or to an ancient idea of classical beauty. And you don't need to have seen the one to feel the power of the other. Or to feel the tug of instinctual delight that makes your thoughts and feelings swirl mystically together - and your writing to swirl out colorfully.

Sweet...

Only

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It is what it is.





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And here is the magician's secret revealed.... Enjoy.

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 End

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How very soon
We paddle away
Summer...

Artist Series #1

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Some time ago Apple pulled the plug on its original gallery page in Mac.Com. In fact it pulled the plug on Mac.Com replacing it with MobileMe. The images which I posted on Mac.Com are still there but are forever fixed - I cannot add to them or rearrange them in any way. I think I can take them down one time, or close the folders out completely. But the gave us a lot of warning so I arranged them a last time and that ship will sail as long as Apple keeps it bobbing - but it will be a ghost ship, never changing.

At any rate, there's a new option to post galleries on Mac.Me... which I'm slowly exploiting and at some point I'll post the URL. One of the new options will be a gallery of portraits of Lancaster artists... And my friend Ron Ettleman is the first in that series. That's one of his larger works which determined the palette and mood for this work.

Last

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Where do you go when every place else has tossed you out?

Here...

Lookout - New Criticism DAMN!

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GRUMBLE! Once upon a time my images were rejected from photographic sites because they were visual art. Now they are getting rejected from visual art sites because... they are filtered! See this image? I've posted the original below. There are photographic based web sites that are for images which have been enhanced by brush and specifically must show the brush strokes. Look at my image here. See the strokes?


Now look at the original. Do you see any strokes? Yeah, I carefully laid the strokes in - with SnapArt2 from AlienSkin. And NO... I did not push a button and get a one-size-fits-all paint-by-numbers, cookie-cutter result. This image was created with over three dozen layers. Look for example at the tree line, the cropping, the quality of light. I have mixed impasto with oils. I have mixed brushes and even in some places employed pointilism. Everywhere I improved upon the dynamic range to create what I felt as I created this image from a picture I took around the corner and down the block from my home here in Lancaster.

This was not a mere swirling about of brushes in CS4 or Painter XI. This is the result of significant forethought, and the application of extensive technique to achieve an end I DARE YOU TO REPLICATE!!!

It is a unique work of art which, among other tools, involved SnapArt2 - a number of times in different locations. And yet it has been rejected as (mere) filtration. If it's so easy to do... go ahead... DO IT! Damn I am pizzzzed.

At first post processing was rejected out of hand by the organic photographers. Now filtration is what? Too easy? THE HELL IT IS! Sigh.....

Grumble... Rant... ERRRRRG! Isn't this just the latest variant of the "I don't know what that is but it isn't photography" close minded schools of mental fertilizer?

Damn I am HOT!

Moi

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My friend Steven Issell was brave enough to use AlienSkin''s SnapArt on his own picture. and people have griped about the avatar I'm widely using. Sooooo.... Today I stood in front of a window, held out my Canon G10 and snapped this picture of me. Then I carefully applied the impasto option that SnapArt offers taking care to make me look as good as the basic material will allow. After all, I own the blog right? So here's the result... And I'm holding AlienSkin totally responsible for making me look like that. Pity you can't see the canvas effect, and the depth of the paint. It's cool to see the effect even on such a familiar face.

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No virgin images or gear stuff this time. Whatcha see is what I got through the G10. Nice that it has 14.5 Mpxs though, they really allow the filter to function and hold onto max sharpness.