View from Mt. Tabor on a chilly and wet morning. Part of an assignment to create a composed image of a minimalist landscape. I suppose this is pretty minimal, don't you? What about the composed part? Well, I removed all of the actual farm buildings, homes, and light poles in Photoshop.
Sometimes perspective can really create some interesting optical illusions. In reality, Claire and Michelle are very close in height. Becauseof the length of the table and the camera angle, I have been able to make Michelle shrink and watch Claire grow. I kind of like messing with your collective heads.
At work, I was knee deep in a project requiring a mock "Like" button when I realized that I was only one hand away from having a thumb fight button. Sometimes one project just spins off a quick little idea for another.
As you can guess by the image, I am still playing around with the idea of multiple self portraits and what I could do with them. I continue to have a lot of ideas for what I could do and this image is another step forward in practicing and developing the Photoshop skills needed to pull it off. In this image, I wanted to get the individual portraits closer together and overlap the bodies. So, I had the right hand portrait overlap the center figure. The actual photographic process remained the same one used in The Five Tims image that I posted last week. On the post process ing side of the equation, I still struggle with the overlapping skin tones and have pretty much decided that the problem I am encountering starts in the photography and will make some changes on the front end. Stay tuned, there will me more images of this type to come in the future. When you have had enough, let me know.
The mustache? It won't last much longer. I have never had a full mustache in my entire life and I wanted to grow one while I could. The stache is on thin ice right now. Everytime I eat ice cream, I get the cold confection all over my upper lip and that my friends, is just silly. Who wants to waste perfectly good ice cream that way?
Ever feel like there is more thatn one person bottled up inside of you? Yestrerday, I was having some of those feelings. This extreme heat is driving me crazy. Part of me wanted to go outside and brave the heat just to take some pictures. But, every time I would go outside, the heat would drive me back into the air conditioning. A heat index of 110F will drive you nuts. Another part of me just wanted to take a nap. Still another part of me was bored and wanted to get up and do something, anything!
That is when I decided to make this image. From beginning to end, an hour and a half for photography and photoshop. Not bad at all. Now that I've finished it, I want to shoot more shots & modify the image. I also have new ideas for other multiple self portrait images. I love it when a little bit of creativity gets the blood going and leads to new ideas.
In the end, going a bit stir crazy led to some great results. The key was acting on that "getting up and doing something, anything" feeling. I am glad that I went with the active personality and not the nap personailty. Though, I have to tell you, I am the king of naps!
Want to make a similar image of your own? Their are probably plenty of methods to choose from but, here is how I did it:
1. Set up your studio. For me this meant moving some furniture around and selecting a big blank wall.
2. Get your outfits ready for your "costume" changes.
3. Set up your camera on a tripod and test out your lighting. The more you perfect your lighting at tis stage, the less work you will have to do in your photo editor.
4. I selected an aperture of f8 to ensure that I had a fairly wide DOF. I wanted all of the "Tims" to be in focus.
5. I shot an image of the chair in AF mode. With the image in focus, I switched to MF mode to lock in the focus.
6. I had decided to shoot five "positions" of myself & placed a pencil on the floor to mark where each position would be centered.
7. I then shot several poses for each position, using the camera's timer. I tried using the remote but, every test image showed the remote in my hand & that is not what I wanted.
8. I then downloaded the images and brought my favorite image for each position into Photoshop by placing each of them on a seperate layer. I stacked the layers so that the over laping positions were on top of the underlying positions.
9. I added a layer mask to each layer and used a black brush to remove the portions of the layer that I did not want to show. This allowed the underlying layers to show through.
10. When I was satified that I had all of the layers the way that I wanted them, I copied and merged the copied layers into a single layer. This allowed me to retain the original layers just in cae I needed them again.
11. Finaly, I made all of my normal curves adjustments for color, tone, contrast, etc. on the new merged layer. I also used the healing brush and clone stamp tool to remove or blend any inconsistencies.
Of all the raw images, this one was my favorite. Why? Because I look skinny. Plus, how cool is that pose?
That folks, was all. Not a whole lot of work for such a fun image. If you give it a try, post your results in the comments. I would love to see your split personalities as well.
Today, I'd like to talk about how similar and opposing colors affect portraits by taking a look at two identical portraits whose only difference is the color of the subjects shirt. This image is a fairly straightforward traditional portrait, perfect for what we want to look at.
Whenever we want the object in our images to stand out from their backgrounds, we need to see a contrast between what we want our audience to focus on and what we don't. Often this contrast takes the form of opposing lighting, texture and pattern. Here, we are looking at contrasting colors. In the original image, the man in the photograph is wearing a purple plaid shirt. Unfortunately purple is very close to red on the color wheel. The similarities in the two colors makes it difficult for our eye to settle in one place. We intuitively want to look at the face but, the purple is trying to draw our eyes to the shirt as well. When our eyes don't know where to go, we lose much of the impact that we could get from the portrait.
In the second image, I have replaced the purple with green. Green is on the opposite side of the color wheel from the red hue that is prevalent in the face and provides a nice contrast. We refer to their relationship as being complementary. Red and green are complementary, purple and yellow are complementary as well as blue and orange.
However, I didn't stop at changing the Hue to green. I also desaturated the green and reduced it's brightness or luminosity to add further contrast with the subject's face. Now, our eyes are drawn very strongly to the face and don't even want to move to the shirt. Color is made up of three distinctive qualities (Hue, Saturation and Luminosity) and we have changed all three of them to maximize the difference in color.
Let's take a look at a second example. In this image of my cat, Betty, The over riding colors are the purple int he wall and the green in her eyes. Another color is the small bit of blue in her collar. Purple and green are complementary colors so, on the surface they look to be ok. The immediate problem is the blue. Blue clashes with both the purple and the green.
Eliminating the blue is pretty easy. I didn't want another patch of color, so I simple desaturated the blue until it turned to grey. Now the buckle simply disappears in to the muted colors of her fur.
With the blue eliminated, I decided that I wanted to place more emphasis on Betty's eyes. Remember the three components of color? Hues, Saturation, and Luminosity? I didn't want to change the hue, the green is her natural color and wasn't a problem in the presence of the purple. I thought the eyes had plenty of brightness so, I decided not to fuddle with the luminosity. That left saturation. By bumping up the saturation of the green, I was able to give more strength to her eyes. Now, without a doubt, you are instantly drawn to her eyes.
Sometimes I just can't get an image out of my mind until I've had a go at it myself. In this case, I was inspired by more than one image. Recently two of my photo buddies have featured images of daisies that were so well done that the shots have been stuck in my head.
The first source if inspiration came from Susan Downing in the form of a daisy shot from a really unusual angle. You can see her inspiring daisy here on flickr.
The second source of inspiration came from Wendy Erlendson. You can find her wonderful daisy image here on flickr.
Combined these two images placed daisies solidly into my head and I couldn't get them out. Luckily, we have some daisies in our flower beds and I didn't have to go far to find my subject. Like Susan, I wanted to do something unusual and I decided to try and blow out a flower that was already white. Even more I wanted to do it in camera, without any post processing.
This image is the result. What do you think about the image? Does it do anything for you? Did the experiment result in anything worth keeping or is this just another blown out image? Let me know what you think.
This is one of those images that just doesn't make the grade. I think it could have been a fine image. In the end, the picture is just too soft and no amount of sharpening is going to make it live up to its potential.
| Exposure | 0.067 sec (1/15) |
|---|---|
| Aperture | f/5.6 |
| Focal Length | 55 mm |
| ISO Speed | 1600 |
If we dissect the EXIF data, we can see a suspect in the shutter speed (exposure). Even when combined with an ISO of 1600 (the image was taken inside of a barn) 1/15th of a second is pretty slow for hand held shooting.
However, I suspect the real culprit is the fact that I was standing on tip toe, holding the camera above my head, and using the live view 2.75 inch display to focus. I don't see evidence of the shaking that you would normally see with long exposures. Instead of shaking, the entire image is just a bit soft. I think we can convict my bad attempt at focusing of the crime.
I love those sun beams that you see streaming from bright sunny windows into dark rooms. Unfortunately, they are hard to find and photograph. So, like any self reliant person, I decided to make my own using the radial blur filter in PhotoShop.
The process was pretty easy. I simply selected the bright areas and hit control J to copy them to their own layer and then applied the radial blur filter repeatedly until the sun beams were of the length I wanted. with the sun beams in place, I used the eraser tool to clean up a few areas.
I can imagine that the technique would be great for creating those beautiful god rays that you see on cloudy days. I can't wait for a cloudy day, go figure.
What do you think of the final results? I think that some of them work better than others. Which images work for you? Let me know, your opinion counts around here.
tim mcmurdo 