I am currently in the middle of two books I find hopelessly fascinating. So much so I can’t put them down.

The first is by author Michael Frye titled Digital Landscape Photography. Michael’s writing seems to bridge the gap between the masters of the past and today’s digital world. It not only covers techniques for composition, it also covers processing of those photos once you get them back to the computer. For more information about this author and the book visit his website at michaelfrye.com.

Chris Orwig has come up with something truly unique here. His book, Visual Poetry, is truly inspired. Filled with great insight and quotes, I find myself highlighting more pages than not and reading them to those around me. For more information you can visit his site at chrisorwig.com. There is also a Flickr Group dedicated to this book.

If you have a nook, this image is sized properly for a wallpaper

HyperSprite

The Photoshop class is over now, passed it with an A, and I have signed up for a web development class. It seems a little strange since I have had my own site for more than ten years but it is part of the road I am on.

I did a little cleanup and took out some of the class pictures. From this point on, pictures here will be more a reflection of my mood than a grade. We’ll see how that goes.

HyperSprite

This was purely playing around. Some time ago I took this picture of a bunch of lenses through another lens with a low resolution digital camera. I created a mask for the glass in the barrels, then took a handful of picture and skewed them in various directions to match the directions of the lenses. I added some noise and used match color from the main image to the crops.

I saw an article at Smashing Magazine about toy cameras and thought the techniques were cool. I loved the old viewfinder effect and decided to give it a try.

I took this photo on a rainy day at a Point Reyes farm a few months back. On Flickr I found a nice frame by xxrmt and it seemed like a nice fit.

To get this to work, I pasted the frame into a new layer, grabbed the handles to expanded it to fit the larger photo, committed the change and set the layer blend mode to multiply and that was it. Neat and easy.

This week we needed to use the “Color Range Selection” tool to make a selection and resulting composite image. The technique was exactly what I needed to accomplish the task of adding clouds so an otherwise murky sky for my magazine cover project. The starting image (seen directly to the left) is the un-cropped version of this photo, I used the the healing and clone tools to remove the telephone poles and signs. I also “turned the lights on” on some of the cars, as suggested by my instructor, by cloning at 91% and 86% of full size to give them a uniform look . I increased the canvas size to make it a portrait. The Color Range Selection tool did a good job with the sky selection, I then used the the lasso and rectangle selection tool to subtract the sea and other elements I did not want covered in sky, like headlight chrome trim rings.

Next, I went on to find a photo with clouds in my library. I found this photo of the city of San Jose as seen from Quick Silver park. I desaturated it, doubled the size and used levels to add a bit more contrast to the clouds. The cutout shows what I ended up using for the composite.

I copied the selection from the first image and pasted it into this one. I then copied the merged selection and pasted it into a new image. The result is what you see at the top of this post.

Note: Two things came to mind when I started working on these two photographs, the first is, you can never have too high a quality source image. The biggest problem with the source image of the cars is that it was taken in back in 2005 with a 4 megapixel Olympus point and shoot. Good for the time and quite portable, there just is not a lot of slack when it comes to cropping it and it was originaly stored as jpeg so it will always have a lower quality than RAW. On the other hand, the valley shot was taken RAW with a 10 megapixel Olympus E510 and while I did enlarge it so I could get enough contiguous cloud, the pre-enlarged photo still dwarfed the car shot and seems much better in terms of quality.

The other thing that came to mind was the usefulness of taking pictures of things just to have them. Sure it might annoy your family and friends from time to time but it comes in handy when you need something like clouds for a project.

So here is a picture I took last weekend while investigating wedding spots for a friend. These bottles of water were in a plastic tub out on the deck supply counter for the restaurant. I was taking pictures of everything else so I figured I would shoot this as well. The first thumbnail is that photo cropped and re-sized.

The next three thumbnails are the same picture after I applied filters from Filter Forge’s 30 day trial. The first is “Comic Book”, the second is “Real Contrast” and the third is “Fiber Image”.  I adjusted the various settings on all three, the third one took forty minutes to process on my reasonably fast laptop. I love the comic book look and am thinking about running some of my older car pictures through it so see what can come up with.

The most frustrating part of all of this was the fact that 64 bit Photoshop does not recognize 32 bit filters and starts with out so much as an error. Once I discovered this and fired up the 32 bit version everything worked great.

My topic for the midterm assignment is the Les Paul Guitar. Introduced by Gibson in 1952, the Les Paul set itself apart from its competition by not only being more luxurious, but also more electronically advanced than its competitors who were building basic solid body guitars at that time. The Les Paul Guitar was named after the then popular jazz pop guitarist and inventor, Les Paul, who had shown Gibson a prototype solid body guitar he built at Epihone circa 1945 called “the log”. Some credit him with the creation of the Les Paul guitar, but most sources stipulate that Gibson had a nearly finished guitar before Les was brought on to the project. Some of the characteristics of the Les Paul guitar are the arch top (a feature found in violins and hollow body instruments), a set neck that was glued, rather than bolted to the body and single cutaway that is distinctively Les Paul. In the early fifty’s Gibson replaced the trapeze bridge with the wrap-around bridge and then later the Tone-o-matic. They also changed from the P-90 to the PAF humbucker pickup in the mid-fifties. Even with those changes, the Les Paul Guitar has remained largely unchanged from that original design.

The Les Paul Guitar is important because it not only transcends generations of musicians, but is the voice of much of the popular music of the last fifty years.

Players of Les Paul Guitars include Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Peter Townshend, Jerry Garcia, David Gilmour, Bob Marley, Nancy Wilson and many more. Even today it continues to draw many of the world’s top players with its warm, creamy tone.

The message in my montage is “Timeless Design”. In our cell phone society, where waiting for a two year contract to run out so one can get a new phone seems like an eternity, it is refreshing that some things age far better. Few designs in production today will still be relevant a decade from now, yet the Les Paul has been able to stay relevant six times that. Designed more than half a century ago, it remains largely unchanged, yet is still in high demand. While some have tried to improve on guitar design with hot pickups and exotic composite materials, it is the old fifties models that are most sought after.

My original plan was the following:  “The montage design will be landscape and have a black background with white patent drawings from Ted McCarty and Seth Lover that were found at http://www.google.com/patents under US Pat. 2714326, US Pat. 2740313 and UA Pat. US Pat. 2896491.

A large ‘59 Sunburst will lay horizontally across the upper third of the page. Smaller examples of various finishes will be below the large one with names of players a layer below that in a dark grey. The names of the players came from The Les Paul Guide at http://www.lespaulguide.com/famous-les-paul-players.phphttp://www.gibson.com/press/custom/gibsoncustom.asp. while most of the guitar pictures will come from Gibson at

To add some accent to the montage, the lower left will have a humbucker pickup and the lower right a coil of guitar strings. The strings and pickups will be from my own photograph collection.”

As you can see, all of the cited work is the same but no longer has the my pick and humbuker. There are also changes to the composition details primarily because the 8.5×11 format seemed restrictive for the original design and made the Sunburst Les Paul seem small and out of place. Instead I went with the original ‘52 design on the side. I also colorized the blueprint, added some photo grain and some grunge brush fill to the edges to give it a weathered look.

The information above about the Gibson Les Paul guitar came from the following URL’s.

http://home.provide.net/~cfh/gibson.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Les_Paul

http://www.lespaulguide.com/brief-history-of-the-les-paul.php

and the book

“The Definitive Guitar Handbook” by Rusty Cutchin

This assignment had me working with text manipulation. I took this photo in the morning on the Lower Saranac and the quote from Joan Fitzgerald.

Using the tutorial here to make the .ICO file, and then lines 4, 5 and 6 of this tutorial here to upload it to my Wordpress theme, I was able to get that tiny little icon to show up in the address bar.

The icon itself is a new 16×16 image with a black background. The HS is in Eccentric Std in white and was sized to fit. I saved it as a .PSD for future editing and then as an .ICO.

The clean looking icon on the left in this post is the same 16×16 file re-sized to 64×64. It is a great example of how saving files as .PSDs and keeping the text as a vector can allow you more flexibility. Had I re-sized the raster version, the best I could have hoped for is this one on the right.

This clip is downright inspirational. It shows, in high speed, how professional graphics can be created using composite techniques. Check out the Making of the Cover Video for Blameless due out in September 2010 from Orbit Books on YouTube.