CD Launch Party features Va Media photos

The local old-time string band Old Sledge will have a launch party for their new CD today from 5 to 8 pm at the Palisades restaurant in Eggleston. Here is a link to the MySpace page for the band, and here is a link to the webpage for the Palisades. The album cover features an interior shot of the band on location in an abandoned building in Eggleston.

VCOM Missions Poster

This photo was actually taken by one of the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM) staff who traveled to Honduras to help out in the clinics. The pose was good, and the image was in focus and not too noisy, but it was pretty dark so I had to add a few lightening layers before final sharpening. I overlaid a couple of textures to focus attention and add some richness to the image before adding the text.

Photo exhibition

VaMedia photos are now on display at the Coffee Depot in downtown Christiansburg, along with works of other local photographers. Be sure to check them out.

Vamedia photos being used by band

Shots from a photoshoot we recently did for a local band have begun to appear in their advertising materials. Here is a link to their MySpace page, on which you can find some of the shots. Click on the 'pics' link to see more of their selections. A few have been posted to the flickr page here.

For Kurt

Here is the sequence of events for the one photo, but I used the same technique and texture for the others. The original image is actually very interesting, with the instruments shown. But the composition bothered me. I think it was the perspective of both window frames, as well as the large amount of white space in the window on the left. So I cropped a little, but still I was not satisfied, so I decided to make the image in the mirror the focal point instead of the banjo. Besides, that image in the mirror is just spectacular, in my opinion. So I cropped in very close to put the emphasis there. Then I just used successive layers to adjust the relative tone of the different sections of the photo, and I finally put a texture layer over it (multiply blending with adjustments to the brightness, contrast and opacity of the texture layer). Somewhere along the line I applied some sharpening. That's it.

another before and after art conversion

Here I added a different background to the painted image because the original background from the photo was distracting. After simplifying the image and using brushes to make the painting emulation, I added a blotchy background using a special watercolor brush and a sampled color from the image, underneath the painting. Of course, a texture was added using various blending modes to finish off the effect.

More art from photography

Accidentally posted this one on the wrong blog, so reposting it here. This is another art conversion using art brushes on a photograph I took at a wedding rehearsal. First had to simplify the image some to remove a bit of the detail, then used several layers and brushes to create the watercolor effect before adding a texture and a border. The final version with a border is on the flickr site.