Fairy World 2

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The ancient fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, Turkey. Squint as the sun sets and you can almost see them flitting among their homes.

Canon 7D: PS4: 3 frame pano, Topaz, custom brushes and sky texture

A REAL Photograph?

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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?

Hudson River Meadow

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Along the Hudson

There are meadows

Fertilized with

Money.

Composition

The world is sweet, mysterious, and beautiful. Sometimes.

Middelbury, VT.

Here's a second take on the image... I'm trying to find a 1920's feeling here in the stillness.

Over There: See?

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Brambles always return. We are only so far in front of life’s jungle. But as long as we’ve got the energy and tenacity to keep ahead of the suckers…. To whack ‘em off when they’re little more than scratchy stubble – Well, it is as if civilization’s here to stay. But it takes a bunch of individual effort – an every-day-thing.

Because the jungle’s really just below ground, and sometimes – even in the middle of a city its fingery brambles claw back through like… like…

Over there: See?

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?

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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 :-)

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?

Fisher's Bench

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You know: There's a really big difference between showing a moment, and revealing its quality and character. I'm convinced that technique is what cranks volume into an artist's voice... Right? Technique lets me dig out the feelings I want to communicate with you. It's reassuring to know how many tools we have in our bag now. How much volume we're able to build up.

PreProcessing The hunting camp up in Potter County has a couple of stocked trout ponds. Here's one I like that looked wonderful through my Canon 40D. PostProcessng The tone mapping was done in PhotoShop CS4 with the help of Topaz where I imagined the mist. Then I used AlienSkin's Snap Art's water color tools to tease out some golden grit.

THE VIRGIN IMAGE!

Haven't done this for a while, but given how much effort this image took... thought you'd enjoy seeing the original I stitched together from four shots into a panorama. Enjoy....

Potter County #3: Pond 1(b)

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See if you write, say poetry, you keep your audience attentive with every paragraph, sentence, and word. And you string them together with no hiccups, burps, or stammers. Reality simply isn't allowed to muddy access, distract, or leap out to screech "BOO!"

That's what digital artists do now. Like I did here. Right?
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PreProcessing: Here's that pond I posted yesterday captured by my Canon 40D's EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) at the hunting lodge in Clara. PostProcessing: Okay, I had to move the furniture around a tad on this piece of the pond to enhance the dazzle of this misty place through a gentle sunrise shower. I did the reconstruction in PS4 and exploded the feelings with AlienSkin's Bokeh and SnapArt's oils. Sweet.

Potter County #2: Pond #1

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If you'll look again at my last post and peer just to the left of the building... well walk that way and immediately beside and to the rear of the lodge is where I stood to grab this pano of their first pond. In fact, that tree to the right here... see it? That's the tree which is framing the top of the lodge in yesterday's post. It seems as if the blue egrets have reduced the trout population this year since even through the mists you can see to the bottom of the six foot deep waters.

PreProcessing: As yesterday, I caught the series through my Canon 40D's EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6). PostProcessing: The four images stitched together nicely with CS4's merge tool. I cropped it some, diddled with the dynamic range then used Topaz and AlienSkin's watercolor devices to tease out the mystery of the pool.

Potter County #1: The Lodge

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Went to visit The Endless Mountains at their western edge this weekend. Here's the hunting camp that sits on its estate in Clara, a tiny town in Potter County, Pennsylvania. Quiet, remote, nice neighbors, but not many. It is a tad different from New York City a week or so ago. There's a reason that Pennsylvania's called the Keystone State. It's the doorway between the megalopolis of America's east coast and the country's west.
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This lodge sits on a LOT of land which forms the biggest part of an Appalachian mountain. Oddly, the folks up there don’t name their mountains, I guess because there are so many of the things? After all, when you have lawn full of grass, you don’t bother to name the blades, eh?

Um, did I mention that the guys never invite wives or lady-friends along? Un-huh, there are still places where men can drink, smoke cigars, play cards, scratch their…. um… And, oh yeah, sometimes hunt. Think of it as an ANTI-SPA. Wonder when that’ll get outlawed, huh?
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PreProcessing: I used my Canon D40 to capture a series through its EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6): PostProcessing: PS/CS4 stitched the shots together and after rigorously adjusting the dynamic range, adding a new sky, and eliminating a parked car – AlienSkin’s SnapArt2 techniques allowed me to mix colored pencils with oil paints and create a mixed media rendering of the lodge-where-women-don’t-go

Pastoral

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I've become fascinated by the possibilities in the SnapArt filter that AlienSkin makes. So I stopped the car by the roadside last weekend just over the Maryland border to the south of Lancaster County. I was hunting for a pastoral that i could make speak eloquently as an oil painting. I stitched a pano together in PhotoShop, then found a dramatic sky from some I found over Cape Cod. I wanted a sky that would set off the palette perfectly and reinforce the wonderful orange highlights in the scene.

This is a robust tool, eh? Especially when you have the gamut of PhotoShop devices to selectively draw out the feelings. As I studied the site, I focused upon the tranquil balance of water, hillside, and the way that the vegetation has, over a lot of years, embraced the bridge and fit it into the natural flow of this place.

That's what I wanted to communicate in a final image... I think I've got it. Wuddaya think?