55 Simple people, simple lives, simple images

Some images, just like some people, break all the rules. And yet they have that ... ummm ... je ne sais quoi. Or as Philadelphians would say ...they have that, "I got no stinkin clue". This is one of those. The crop is hideous. The subject's outline is mangled by the person behind him. The window glass blurs his fantastic hat. BUT ... his expression is priceless! Woohoo!! He saved my butt! Let's call him Martin Chuzzlewit ... not to be confused with Mr. Pecksniff or the younger Martin C.

I shot a lot of buggies in Lancaster County PA that day. Here's another. These buggies were moving surprisingly fast for only having two horsepower (sic). So fast, in fact, it was difficult to get them sharp and I was trying to be discrete so I used my Sigma 150mm (it's the longest lens I have).

Doesn't everyone resonate with the idea of slower and simpler lives? My wife and I spend a few weekends a year in Lancaster slowing ourselves down. Watching simple folk live simple lives. Not many of them have blogs since ... well ... umm ... they don't use ELECTRICITY!! Ok, that's a fallacy. They use a little bit. But no blogs. No Canon 5D mark II's. No Macbooks or photoshop. No twittering or flickring. They don't buy buggies on Ebay or Craigslist for that matter. Drudge is the stuff that you sweep out of the stalls ... wow! ... I really need to get a life.

We usually go to the same B&B (shout out to the Inn at Twin Linden!!). The gardens are gorgeous and the German / Dutch food is ... well ... fattening fer sure. Deep fried chicken in pure lard ...veggies fresh off the vine ... milk that still moos ... steaks that still give milk (eww) ... yummm, numm, nummm.

Ok, enough rambling. Here's another shot for the road (hehehe). Get it!? The road! Get it!?

Why do you guys read this nonsense!?!!!!

Bye for now and peace,

Glen

45 The Red Couch

There are certain patterns of gold and red that find themselves inside my head.
Certain places where I can go to imagine wonders and wander with mages.
Warm I slide deep down inside of the place where my book and I do hide.
And holding close to me my pillow ... or is that my steed?  I suppose it depends on me.>

(c) glen goffin 2009

~~~~~~~~~~

This is a shot I took in Bermuda in the summer.  It's from the lobby of the Princess Hamilton (sudden sighs of, "oh, yeah, I remember those couches" bubble from the audience). 

I love to write poems.  And I think that if I spent more than 10 minutes, I might actually write a good one.  There is something about the magic of a well placed word, the rhythm of a percolating syllable, the delight of an unexpected turn ... all of which I find so satisfying.  Try it.  I promise not to tell :) 

Love and peace,

Glen

34 Photographic grunge

Project: Lay on that grunge vibe!

Hmmm ... where to start? Ok, let me pull out an old photo from my Philadelphia set. What? It's blurry? Oh frisco! Ok, let's go with it. I mean, let's grunge it up so that you hardly notice.

First, make the color pop a little and adjust white-balance. Of course you can do that in either Lightroom or PS. In this case, I just went straight to PS and used the eyedropper tool under color balance. That stinking eye-dropper is way too cool!

Next, let's layer on a texture to give it that dark and scratchy look. I had to go through a bunch of different textures from my inventory. This one is courtesy of Ghostbones, I think. I tend to get a lot of my textures from Flickr users who give them away rights-free. I try not to use any that come from folks who want to keep their rights to them because then, when I make a composite work, I have to remember all the derivative rights acknowledgements. What a PAIN!

When I'm trying out textures, I open the texture and then copy it on my project as a layer. Thank heaven for CTL-T! Then I experiment with the layer type to find the one most suited. I think I landed on 'multiply' for this one. I had to tone it down to about 60% or so. As I look at it now, I wonder if that had been too aggressive a blending mode? 'Overlay' might be better. I'll go try that again later.

This particular texture has a natural vignette to it so that helped focus the viewer on the sign and the headlights of the car. It also hid that fact that, at 6400 ISO, there was notable noise in the skyline.

The texture has a yellowish tint. I didn't bother to correct that since with grunge ... well ... anything goes really! That's what makes it fun.

Anyhow, voila, here's the result. Did I get that late-night, grunge-band kind of vibe with this? Is it too over-the-top? Grunge is like hot-sauce, you add it 'to-taste' ... and I like it HOT!

Peace,
Glen

31 Google Adsense Ads

I love the fact that a regular Joe like me can effectively become his own publisher with all the help that Google has provided. I'm such a novice though! If you're a novice too then join me and we'll try to navigate our way through this. If nothing else, it will be comical ... like ... um ... ordering a cheesesteak with Swiss. Sorry, that's a Philadelphia inside joke:) Well, you know what I mean.

On good blogs, there are almost always banner ads posted which just seems natural to me. I mean come-on, those are real websites. Stinky Fish is like an embarrassing amusement. The kind of site you have to ALT-TAB from the screen when anyone walks past. And for the number of times my faithful readers (my wife and my mom ... yeah, that's them up there) read this site, advertising isn't worth the electrons it would take to paint the pixels.

But even as I write this post, Google has strategically enticed me by placing the word 'monetize' directly in front of my eyes - just inches above this very text. Monetize ... yes yes yes ... (the sound of little splishes here as my drool-plets hit the keyboard). I can hardly type anymore as my eyes are fixated on that word. It must be the key to complete financial freedom ... to a vacation home in Ocean City ... to a Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 ... to an Alien Bees lighting rig ... yes, yes ... I'm certain of it!! Of course, I was certain that The Apprentice wouldn't last a whole season :(

If you select that tab, it brings you to the Google Adsense setup screen. There appear to be two kinds of advertising plans that Google provides - pay-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) or pay-per-click. WHAT!?! (or as my wife would say, 'wuut!?!') A THOUSAND IMPRESSIONS!?! I'm already discouraged. Hmmm ... mom, I have a really big favor to ask ... :-]] If a picture is worth a thousand words, is it also worth a thousand impressions!?! Not mine, that's for sure.

So I typed in the account setup stuff and ... kabang!!! I got an error.

More in the next post. When I figure out what to do and proceed on my way to making millions of dollars in the phoblography (you heard it here first) and web publishing business.

Peace,
Glen

30 Google Analytics

Welcome to the revamped website!

So I added Google analytics just to confirm what I already knew. That I can ramble at will and not offend a soul! BTW, I thought this shot of a Pennsylvania outhouse was appropriate for today's post since it is pretty crappy. Bring your newspaper since I don't think there is wifi in there.

hmmm ... if a toilet flushes in the woods, does it make a sound? Now that's my kind of metaphysics.

Google analytics is free (at least so far) and actually pretty easy to use. You sign up for an account which is quick and then you paste their javascriptlet into your website. From that point forward, teh scriplet uploads website hits to the Google analytics server. Then you just poke into that portal every two seconds to see how many people visited your site since two seconds ago. Or, as in the case of THIS blog, you call your mom and ask her to surf your site so that you can see if the counter even works at all. Simple really. Of course, that's only if you can live with the disturbing secret that your mom hit on your site.

For more info go to http://www.google.com/analytics

back soon ... peace

29 Photographic Abstractionism?

Is 'photographic abstractionism' a self contradiction? Is it more accurately artistic distortion? Maybe those are the same things ... only different. Abstractionism was always an artistic distortion. Or was it an accurate personal revelation of a particular viewpoint?

There are enough common, foundational experiences of our world that we can be confident that, even to the artist, there were distortions of the thing represented relative to the perception of it. Of course, in many if not the majority of cases, the subject depicted never actually existed in reality. It was a complete figment but it was always analogous to real experiences ... and distorted even in that context. The intent - to evoke ... not remind. Of course, Pavlovian association can be leveraged to evoke subconscious response and so, reminiscent associations are a crucial element of evocative art.

This image has been distorted. Not warped. Just modifed. It is abstract in feel. A valid abstraction even though it uses a photographic medium. It's not depictive ... but it is definitive :)

that was fun ... complete nonsense ... but fun :) I've decided that the best blogs make you think. They don't necessarily make you agree ... but they challenge your sensibilities.

Peace,

Glen

24 True HDR ... can be brittle

This picture of some trees in Nockamixon Park seems to me to be dry and brittle. My goal was to get the image to closely represent what I "saw" when I took it. What I saw wasn't really what was there .. it was my impression of what was there. I used bracketing on my D80 with a 2EV bracket spacing and shot this handheld. I always set everything manually and generally use center-weighted metering but I use it like spot metering by metering the highlights and shadows separately. I've been shooting RAW (NEF) almost always and occasionally checking histograms in odd lighting situations. I've selected Adobe RGB color space since it seems to be the least compressed.

Sometimes you have to take some steps backward before you move forward ;D That let's you see the bigger picture ... then you can move forward and focus on the really interesting things ..xxx

I'm in the 'few steps backward' phase right now. Learning new tools and techniques. Seeing what they can do ... yada yada. Hopefully I'll be a better photographer in the end ;D

If anyone has fave HDR compositing tools ... please drop me a note with your recommendation!!! Photomatix seems to be the one I come back to. I tried compositing with Photoshop and realized that there was slight rotation in the images (they were handheld) and finding the rotation point was nearly impossible. :DDD What I don't like about Photomatix is that it doesn't seem to let you select the blend styles or percentages for each layer. It does however provide some nice tone mapping controls.

With Photomatix, the initial HDR compositing is performed on the source images and any special processing selections that were made such as 'remove chromatic aberrations' are done as one big batch process. The final composited image is then presented to you. At that point, you can select whether you want to perform tone mapping or not. The tonemapping module seems to be pretty powerful but not entirely intuitive. More on that later when I figure it out better :)

When Photomatix was done with this image ... it was much too heavy! You know what I mean, don't you!?! That over-processed look. I'll attach it when I convert it to JPEG. So I had to blend it back together with the original image that had a lighter, airier feel in PS.

Peace,
Glen

21 New workflow ideas from Mitchell

Thanks to Mitchell Kanashkevitch, I'm trying out a new workflow. I downloaded Capture One 4 Pro trial and made two variants of this. One +2 EV and one -2 EV. Then I used the Photomatix trial to merge the three. I also used the Photomatix Tone Correction to alter contrast and levels a little bit. Here's the result.



Now here's the original. Of course, Mitchell also does quite a bit of dodging and burning. That's next on my list of techniques to learn. What I was really interested to see is whether pseudo HDR using variants from the SAME image really had a notable effect. From what I can see ... it does! Now to try it out on some more images ... hehe ;DD

Steps in Workflow so far ...
1. Capture image
2. Import into Capture One (haven't tried direct import from the camera yet)
3. Mark with colors (green, yellow, etc)
4. Delete and clean up the ugly stuff
5. Open new session and pick a project photo
6. Make two variants (+EV and -EV)
7. Process and commit these to output
8. Import into Photomatix and create pseudo HDR
9. Tonemap
(8 alt. Import into CS3 and use layering to create HDR)
10. Dodge, burn, etc
11. Save back to project and to finished works
12. woohooo ... try next one

I'm really excited about all this!! Seems weird ... but being able to come just a teeeeeench closer to the kind of work that Mitchell does is totally exciting. Next big decision ... in 30 days ... buy Capture One or not ... LOL!

Peace out bean sprouts!
Glen

What makes a classic image?

Why does every photographer end up shooting a row of benches ... or chairs ... or ....grapes sitting in a bowl or ... well you get what I mean.

Well I felt like I better do one too. You know, like a homework assignment or something. Like a checklist of must-dos. I saw these sitting at the Moravian Tile Works. The day was cloudy with a dull gray light that seemed to suck the color out of everything. As if it was possible, these benches were even duller and grayer still but not wanting to miss the moment they knew it was their one opportunity to shine.

I waited till all the tourists left and ignored the two bored middle-school girls that wanted to be part of the shot. Set up my tripod and ripped out a few shots. Really didn't need any post-processing. I left a hint of tilt for tension and just a little bit of color boost and ... voila! Hope you like it :)

Andreas turned me on to another great photographer's blog:
http://imagefiction.blogspot.com/
check it out ... you'll be glad you did!