Photos become art

Here is another photo to art conversion. Original photo on the left, converted on the right. Here I had to lighten the background quite a bit before doing the painting. Also, had to do a little freehand touch up after using the art brushes to get better plane separation in a couple of places. Fun

Textures

Some interesting effects can be constructed by pulling parts of images out of photos and then layering them with various textures. In this case, I found a photo of an old sheet music booklet on flickr and decided to construct something reminiscent of an old photo card with it. I grabbed the image of a pretty girl from a wedding shot I took last summer, converted both the texture and the girl to B&W, colored it sepia, then layered them together with the appropriate blending. I think it still needs some work, but it showed me the concept was workable.

Wedding Art

Sometimes a shot can be saved by converting it to another format. In this case, I was shooting with available light under mixed incandescent and fluorescent conditions, and I had kept the ISO down to minimize noise. The lens was at f/2.8 so the depth of field was also minimal. In the photo, the bride's face was not really in sharp focus, so I decided to convert the photo to digital art. See the result on the flickr page.

original photo

This is the original photo

punching up photos

Did you ever wonder why some photos just don't seem to have the same crispness and balance of color saturation and contrast that you remember in the original scene? Digital photos often suffer from a sort of built-in compression in comparison to the old color slide films. But it is possible to restore the photos so the remembered scene through some judicious post-processing. The photo here, which is also featured on the flickr page, has been restored to reality through a multiple layer process that increases contrast and bumps up the dynamic range. I don't have the original on hand, but I will post it as soon as I can.

Local Event Photography

Local festivals are great spots to capture some interesting candid photos. These shots were taken at a local pumpkin festival in Riner, Virginia. The fall colors are great for photography.

Low-fi camera shots

While on vacation at Myrtle Beach I decided to explore the possibilities of a low-fi camera using my iPhone. The camera is not great, but it's interesting to shoot with. There isn't much you can do with the photos except use them the way you take them - like the old film cameras. I normally take a shot with an eye to post-processing later. But the low fidelity of a mobile phone camera pretty much excludes this possibility. So you have to think about what you are shooting. The cool thing about the camera is that it somehow seems to have a large depth of field, again like the old cameras, or maybe a pinhole camera. Makes it interesting. See the shots on the flickr page.