I took this picture a while back and thought that it would make a great HDR. It turned out perfect. I wonder if anyone would buy it. I would!
This photo is an up close image of a rock jar. It had nice texture and some interesting design. I gave this image a slight vignette, boosted the vibrance and slightly increased the exposure level.
I picked the abstract contest because of the topic. I have always like abstract art and the ability to create your own interpretation of it. I found it fairly difficult to think of creative abstract ideas.
Link to contest website: http://photographicsbyui.blogspot.com/
Date Submitted: Nov. 29, 2011
This image was taken at the BYU-Idaho Gardens. I chose this image because of its composition, light, and subject matter. The blossom stands out and if you look close, you can see that all the black specks are actually bugs. The sun was facing the camera which is probably what gives the flower the white coloration on the pedals closest to you. I was up on a rock much higher than it. Using a telephoto lens, I zoomed in and this is the image that I captured. I probably could have gotten away without any edits to this photo. My camera produced two photos. One .NEF, and one .JPG. The .NEF was much darker than the .jpg so I chose to use that one. I did increase the exposure to brighten it up and increased the saturation; both done in camera raw. On the lilly pads to the left and right of the blossom, I added a smart sharpen filter and sharpened them 50%. so they stood out much better. Nothing more was done. The final print is a 24×36 poster that turned out perfect.
Two of my favorite images have been placed in a fine arts template which I made using Photoshop. It’s quite simple to do this technique and looks great to. First create a white background around 18 x 12. Create a black rectangle and repeat it 4 times and center it. You can then create a clipping mask with you image which will place the image behind your rectangles. Not only does this look really professional, it is super easy to add different images to thie “Fine Art Template”
I had a lot of fun doing this assignment and was able to get some great shots. For the first shot I used steal wool. I stuffed some steal wool into a kitchen whisk and tied a string to the end of it. Then using a nine volt battery, rubbed the steal wool until it had enough embers to stay lite. I started to swing the whisk in a constant circle. This caused the steal wool to rapidly burn and the centrifugal force caused pieces of steal wool to fly out. This gave a really nice affect and turned out nice.
The next next shot uses a flashlight. I painted my name in the air backwards. I think I did a pretty good job writing backwards. The technique is neat because my name seems to hover above the ground.
The third image uses a stationary light source and I moved the camera. The light source for this “abstract” image was a night light plug-in. I used a 1 second shutter speed and simply moved the camera in a small circular motion.
The last image w shot at home on our fireplace mantle. Thanks to the holiday season, set-up and take-down were easy – thanks to my lovely wife.
The borders on these images were from tutorials provided by Caryn Esplin. The grasshopper image used the brushed-on effect. It’s intention is to provide a common sense of feel to the viewer. Most people recognize grasshoppers in the grass. However this grasshopper was in some tomato plants. The tonka truck uses the burned border effect. The reason I used this was to be able to still see the entire image but also allow for text to be visible. The pine tree uses the sprayed edge effect. I used this technique to compliment the spikes of the pine needles.
Honestly I’d have to say I didn’t enjoy this project. I ran into all kinds of problems with my scanner in addition to running into all kinds of problems with my imagination. For some reason I struggle creating things from scratch. Through a lens, I can see what looks good and I would much rather stick with that. After many scans of dumb things, my mind finally caught a glimpse of something I liked.. Abstract. The combination scan consists of a kids toy microphone, a wooden carved head, which I cranked up the exposure because it sat so far away from the scan table, and the backside of my guitar. Using these three items, I scanned them and brought them together in Photoshop. I simply created layers for each item and used the clone stamp to bring each item in on top of the microphone. It was fun at the end, but please don’t make me do that again.
For the single scan, I wanted it to resemble a camera image using a small aperture. Because the guitar was not completely flat, certain aspects of the guitar were blurry while some of the strings were clear. It was exactly as I wanted and turned out fairly nice.
These images were taken during sun down. For Ryan’s portrait, I used an umbrella to diffuse the flash. This is where the flash goes through the umbrella and then onto the subject. For Kristin’s portrait, I did a candid shot while she was posing for other students using a flash and an umbrella. I felt like there was enough natural light and took this shot without flash. They both turned out very nicely and theses images demonstrate flash and natural lighting.
These two shots were taken to show blur and frozen action. The ghost shot of Israel turned out really nice. I was surprised that the affect this technique produces doesn’t cause really any tracers as the subject walks out of the frame after 2 seconds of standing there. A longer shutter speed helped capture this image.
For the second image, a higher shutter speed is used to capture students jumping off of the stairs (not very unique, sorry). Goo lighting produces the best picture because the shutter speed is not open for very long.
These poles were interesting to me. They were weathered and weary with much of its color sluffed off. The background colors seemed to fit with the image as a whole. I never once moved the camera for these shots. It sat on a tripod and I used the cameras focal points to change where the camera focused. I really like how it turned out.