Alternative Takes

Every once in a while an image just works for you, so well that you keep looking into it. With the magic of Photoshop it is easy to try on the grayscale, for instance, to see a good old black-and-white version as seen here. Meantime I tried an effect that produced a hand-drawn effect.

Two more views of the still water under the bridge in the next post.

Twilight Zone Pond Water Iris

Looking through some recent pond and waterfall favorites, I found this image, with the colors altered in Photoshop. While experimenting, I often delete the results and try to remember the experience. But when one catches my eye, I keep it. This one had a 'Twilight Zone' quality that made me save it. I like it better than the bright yellow original.

The plant is commonly known as a Water Iris. Can't wait for it to bloom again this spring. Who knows where an experiment might lead?

Ceres -- The Goddess of Cereal

Experimentation with Polar Coordinates will yield some interesting abstracts, as we have seen. Last night I got a pretty haunting concrete image I just had to post.

The Chicago Board of Trade, an art deco masterpiece opened in 1930, has a statue of Ceres, goddess of grain, atop the building. Shot from the street on a sunny day, she glistens and looks straight down LaSalle Street from her position of honor.

Wrapping her into a Polar Coordinate and cropping off the top of an imperfect circle leaves her quite recognizable, but looking down into a pit. Perhaps a commentary on the current financial mess? Either way, a definite keeper.

New post tomorrow. No more Polars for now, guaranteed.

One More Polar Coordinate

On second thought, we will hold off the new direction for one more day to look at another strange abstract effect from the Polar Coordinates. In an email to a friend who had seen the previous post, I was writing about where to find the effect -- it is a Photoshop Filter Distort selection -- and I realized I had limited my fun with that filter.

The previous post was like most of my Polar productions, which would only be a dozen or so. In each case, I used a panoramic photo or cropped one from a traditionally-shaped photo. In each case, I selected a photo with a clear three-layer arrangement -- the river below, the bridge between and the sky above, for example. That produces the logic of the prior post, with the river at the core, the bridge and its crane as the highlight and the sky as the background. I will of course continue to experiment with such pictures.

But as I checked on the use of the filter, I happened to have a non-panoramic photo, one with nothing like the three-stripe arrangement mentioned above, and I used the process on it purely to refresh my memory on the use of the filter. I quickly used SAVE AS to hold that image and later returned to decide if I wanted to keep it. What do you think? I definitely like it and plan to do further experimentation with it.

Meanwhile, thanks for the help with experimenting in a new direction, Laura. We will move in another direction in the next post. Maybe.

Abstract Processing

Another place to find abstracts would be in the post-processing. Whether by intent or by accident, when an image does nothing for you, you can try something else. Often a change of color, a blurring, a creative crop will create a completely new image. There are times when dropping color overlays over such an image, one by one, will result in finding just the right color. Image manipulation under pressure can be demanding work, but this can and should be fun.

An intentional abstract from a very different effort in our next post.

TRAVELING Magazine

As far as I know, there is no current magazine called TRAVELING. And so I have named my personal Photography Magazine TRAVELING, with issues dated July and August of 2008 as our trip fell into both months. Each issue, by design, has no other pages, just a cover. And I had such a fine time doing the two issues that I retrofitted one from Manhattan and dated it to July 2007.

Working in Photoshop, learning how to handle layers and cutouts and how to resize and rework: it is all so interesting and it continues to open my mind to further experiments. Here I started with the base layer photo of Mt. McKinley and superimposed Wado, Richie Beattie's lead dog. The UPC code was borrowed from a Google image site, but since it will never be scanned it should suffice.

A poem about the piercing eyes of Wado and perhaps about politicians and athletes:

EYES OF THE LEAD DOG

Adventure in Alaska is built on the base of the intrepid dog teams:
Pure power to pull food and supplies or competing racers through the Yukon,
Sleeping in makeshift places well below the zero mark,
Finding trails hidden under drifting snow, avoiding obstacles,
And always lead by one dog, the lead dog, with the piercing eyes.

The lead dog will show you the eye of leadership, not just in the color,
But in the apparent ability to see past the drifts, through the darkness of
Twenty-two hour night, around or over the obstacles, always sighting on
Goals of the team, finish lines, towns or villages, where we need to be.
Eyes of the lead dog may not actually see all that the team needs to know
But the team needs to have confidence that the eyes of the lead dog see victory.

Whether he does or not.

Marjorie Glacier

Deep in Glacier Bay we stopped, still, for over two hours near Marjorie Glacier. Clearly the image of the frozen river works here. In one image we see the vista, the width of the glacier, and in the other a closeup peek at the colors and intricacies we stared at for such a wonderful period of time. As the ship rested, people interested and speaking to one another but quiet, almost respectful, we waited for the glacier to calve.

If a glacier is a frozen river, when a portion of it breaks off or separates, that is called calving. When a glacier calves, the resulting ice dropped into the water below is an iceberg. While the very word iceberg is intimidating in some ways, most icebergs are quite small and would not be harmless to any sizable vessel.

A poem:

MOUNTAIN OF MEMORIES

First visit to Alaska is sensory overload
Glacier Bay is so surrounding with images and sound
A mountain of memories comes home with you --
And a mountain make of rock, not ice,
Since rock will never melt.

After nearly two hours waiting, without success, for a calving, the captain announced that the ship would begin by turning to leave. We would have nearly another hour to hope for the sight of a calving. The result will be in the next post.

Cruising Glacier Bay

Imagine a National Park that has no apparent paved roads; the visitors use the water to see the majesty of the frozen rivers. Most of a day involved cruising by several glacier areas, one more picturesque than the other.

A note on photo composition. Yes, indeed, I have heard of the Rule of Thirds. I can't say I agree with it being a "rule," though; in my Photography Workshop I teach it and the Concept of Thirds. I developed a grid overlay that can show the focal points perfectly, but no rule is better than the eye of the photographer. The reflection of the glacier gently invited me to collect it, to admire it, and to respect it. That is what I tried to do with this image. The power diagonals certainly invite the eye of the viewer to explore.

A note on Photoshop. Yes, I do post process; sometimes heavily and sometimes quite lightly. I know that historically, photographers carried gradient filters for images such as this. In the camera, this image was too light above and too dark below. While the same filter would still work, I have such a filter built right into Photoshop. Using CS2, a full two generations behind the cutting edge, I can do so many things to enhance, to correct, to experiment. I can work hard and I can have fun. And all these efforts are work of the photographer trying to refine the image to become the image he had in his mind.

So, the moral of the dual lesson is simple. Know the rules and know when to break them. Get the image as good as you can in the camera and then do what you must to make it the image you want. If the result is a photograph that please the photographer, it is a success.

We will return to Glacier Bay on the next post and you will meet a Glacier named Marjorie.