Sunset Over Hutto

Original:  To the bottom left you can see the farm house that did not belong, the dark areas at the upper corners, and an overall film covering the picture.

Final Picture:  The farm house has been cropped, the picture slightly rotated, minor cloning performed, the dark areas fixed, and the colors enhanced.

     Being in the right place at the right time is always a great feeling - being able to capture an image that you would have missed if you had been 5 minutes early or 5 minutes late.

     And then there are those moments where you wait to be in the right place at the right time, like taking a picture of a sunrise or sunset.  

     One such moment for me was shortly after I bought my first digital SLR camera, my formerly beloved Pentax K100.  Currently it is my knock-around camera - the camera that I take with me in bad conditions - but previously it was the camera I constantly had with me to capture every exciting moment of the day.  I only had it for a few weeks when I captured a beautiful sunset over Hutto, Texas.

     At the time I was visiting family, and the visit eventually turned in to an all day event.  Anxious to use my new camera, I became decided to wander around and take pictures.   The area of Hutto I was in was located on top of a large hill that overlooked farmland and houses.  To the west of my location was a small farm, and as the sun began to set I had the idea that it would be great to capture that moment.  It was a cold, crisp day, no wind, and perfect weather for shooting pictures, minus the cold.

     The problem I had was that it was a new camera and I was not yet familiar with all the functions, and I was unsure what settings to use to perfectly capture the moment.  I did not want to take a few pictures and believe I had caught the image perfectly, so I decided to take lots of pictures at different settings, knowing that eventually I would have a perfect picture.  Which it turns out is a good way to shoot pictures - if you are faced with being in the right place at the right time, but you are not sure if you have the perfect settings for the shot, take lots of pictures using different settings, and hopefully one of those pictures will be perfect.  Part of the problem I had was that I was shooting straight in to the sun, so the reading I was getting was going to throw off the contrast in the rest of the picture.

     I came back home, eager to see how my pictures turned out, and was surprised that I had been correct all along - sure enough, the first pictures I shot were not the correct settings - I either overcompensated for the bright sky and it came out too dark, or I undercompensated and it came out too light.  Luckily, subsequent pictures had different settings and I was able to tame the bright sun and bring out the blue in the sky.  But like most pictures, only after taking it in to Photoshop was I able to realize how beautiful it really was.

     In Photoshop (I currently use version CS4) I started off with a beautiful image that just needed some color tweaking and minor retouching.  Photoshop always reminds me of the old Irish Spring soap commercial, where the actor writes in the soap film on the glass shower door to show the layer of film and grime you would have with a different soap.  When I use Photoshop, my goal is to remove that layer of film and grime that the picture has naturally.  The layer of film and grime is most evident if you do a split-screen comparison of the before and after picture - no matter how beautiful the picture is that you start with, Photoshop can remove that layer and make you wonder what was so beautiful about the original photograph to begin with.  

     To start, I changed the IMAGE (go to IMAGE, down to IMAGE SIZE, and change the dimensions to 10 inches width and 8 inches height, and resolution to 300) to a standard size I like to use - 8 x10 inches, 300dpi - and did some minor cropping.  In the original there is a farm house at the bottom left, so I cropped this out as it did not work in the image I wanted to create.  I also did a minor rotation of the picture by using the ROTATE function (go to EDIT, down to TRANSFORM, then select ROTATE; this will only work on a layer that is not the background layer; to do this, go to LAYER, and select DUPLICATE LAYER).

     To tweak the colors, I tried different settings to see what worked best.  Photoshop has lots of great color adjustments, so there is not any one particular setting to recommend.  Some times using the AUTO TONE, AUTO CONTRAST, or AUTO COLOR will be better than what you can manually do yourself (go to IMAGE, and down to AUTO TONE, AUTO CONTRAST or AUTO COLOR), and then other times they will not give you the desired results and you will need to adjust colors manually.  Using LEVELS and CURVES  (go to IMAGE, and down to LEVELS or CURVES) requires a very detailed explanation of how they function, but if you go there and either play around with the controls, or select the PRESETS they provide, you can see how the minute adjustments will dramatically change your picture.  The best way to learn Photoshop is just use the various functions - play around with a picture and see what the different tools and functions do.  If you are good at following instructions in a book, then pick up a User Guide for Photoshop, otherwise, just start playing around with all the functions in Photoshop - eventually you will start learning how they work.  Also, a great resource that I like to use is located at the Photoshop.com website - they have lots of short videos you can watch and learn how an expert does something - how the CLONE tool works, how the MAGNETIC LASSO works, and so forth.

Next Up:  Aliens Strike Llano!

When Butterflies Attack

...but they look so harmless in Grandma's garden.

     Most people are unaware of the inherent danger imposed by those delicate, wispy, bird-like creatures - butterflies.  They look harmless and beautiful flying around flowers and dancing about in a garden as the sun shimmers off their iridescent wings, but do not be fooled by their disguise - they are dangerous.

     The next time you are sitting outside and one flies near you, or gasp, lands on the head of a playful child, beware. They are not flying for your amusement - they are probing your defenses - looking for weaknesses in your perimeter. 

     At least that is story that led to my photograph, Attack!

     Armed with my beloved orange Pentax Kx, lots of time, and a fertile imagination, I set off one day to create a whimsical picture of what those dastardly creatures could possibly do if nature were left unchecked.

     Drunk on Starbux coffee, I started off with a concept - butterflies sweeping through a city and carrying away cars.  The idea was simple, and the execution took a modest amount of Photoshop ability.  Believe me, if I can do this, you can do this too.  

     The picture can be broken down in to several different parts - the skyline, the cars, and the butterflies.  The most difficult part of the picture was creating the butterfly in the foreground, as it needed to show motion.

      This is typically how I create my artwork - I develop a story first, then go about trying to illustrate the story. This is a good way to breathe life in to your work. If you find that your work is staid and lacks freshness, try this approach:  what is the story you are trying to tell, and does the image you create tell the story. The story does not have to be complicated and it can even just be a thought, such as what would the entrance to Heaven look like?  What would it look like if I were in a small town shopping one day when a 20-story robot from outer space attacked Earth?  

     Back to, Attack!

     In Photoshop, I created the base layer - a park surrounded by skyscrapers downtown - and used this to determine what else went in the picture, such as how many butterflies, what direction they traveled, and how big or small they appeared.   In the background, faces needed to be changed and altered to protect the innocent and the sky needed to be cut out.  Most pictures I go to this much effort on I will change out the sky, as usually I will get a good shot of the target (in this case the downtown park scene), but the sky will be blah.  The original picture had a nice blue sky, but a more vibrant and exciting sky needed to be added.  So the background base picture was cleaned up, sharpened, and the colors enhanced.  In Photoshop, I like to use the Unsharp Mask (go to FILTER, down to SHARPEN, then select UNSHARP MASK) to sharpen, as it gives more control over the degree of sharpness.  

     To delete the sky, I used the LASSO tool to select the majority of the background and delete, then blew up the picture and by hand I deleted individual spots in the trees so the sky could show through by using a combination of the ERASER tool with the Airbrush setting, and using the LASSO tool to select larger areas.  Deleting the sky around a tree is very challenging and takes a lot of patience, but if you have the patience to do that it will reflect in the quality of your work.

     After deleting the sky I added a layer with a new sky behind the base layer, then maneuvered the sky around til I found the perfect position.  With the sky I tweaked the colors to make them more vibrant, and used the CLONE tool to clean up dust and spots from my lens.  That is one of my biggest pet peeves - dirt on the lens.  It is very annoying and I have a hard time keeping my lens clean.

     Next I created each butterfly and car shot.  This was done by searching through my photo library for butterfly pictures and vehicle pictures.  One thing I do when I am out taking pictures is to just take random pictures of whatever I see - cars, buildings, street signs, clouds, leaves, hobos - whatever my big heart desires.  The reason for this is whenever I have an idea that I want to create, I like to have the tools handy.  It is similar to having a workbench in your garage where you have screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches and so forth - your photo library should be like that too, so you have a folder labeled, Clouds, a folder labeled, Cars, a folder labeled, Robots, and so on.  Then when you want to create a picture of butterflies attacking a city, all you have to do is sort through your folder of, Butterflies, and your folder of, Vehicles, to find all the tools you need to create your masterpiece.  

     The picture of the red car in the foreground was from a museum, for example, so I cut the car out of the background, cleaned up the car, made it more vibrant and fixed the problems with the picture.  For the red car I needed to fix the front window as it had a bad glare and reflection.  What I did was select the shape of the windshield then add in a series of colors with the PAINT BUCKET and AIRBRUSH tools to give it a shimmering window reflection of the sky. 

     After I fixed the problems with the car it was then time to add the butterfly.  I found a picture for each different butterfly, then went about the same process as the base layer by cutting out the background.  I wanted each butterfly to realistically look like it was carrying the car, rather than appear like it was just laid on top of the car, so I had to bend the legs a bit to achieve that.  I did that by using the LASSO tool to create the shape of the leg that I would be adding, then airbrushed in a series of colors to give it a realistic 3-dimensional look.  Next I needed to fix the wings so that they gave the appearance of being in motion.  This was easier than it seemed - I copied the wings on to another layer, then gave it the appearance of motion by using the MOTION filter (go to FILTER, then to BLUR, then to MOTION BLUR).  I then adjusted the OPACITY to approximately 50% in the LAYERS toolbox, so that you could see through the motion blur.  I then attached the butterfly to the car using the different layers, then under LAYERS I merged the layers together by using the MERGE DOWN layer command.  At that point I had one layer that contained nothing but the butterfly and the car.

     After creating 7 different pictures of butterflies carrying cars, it was time to add them to the base layer and position them properly.  The butterflies and cars needed to get smaller in background, so I did that by using the TRANSFORM command to shrink each layer, then rotate the butterfly and car to an aesthetically pleasing position.  The shot of the police car with the door open is a perfect example of why it pays to take pictures to build up your library.  If I had not taken a picture of an actual police car with the door open, I probably would have felt the need to create the door by hand using the LASSO tool.  So it pays to take pictures of nothing in particular when you are out shooting pictures, with the hope that one day you will have a need for a picture of a police car with the door open, or a cloud, or a hobo, or a stop sign.

     When I finish a picture that required a lot of time and effort, I always like to save the original as a PSD (Photoshop) - this way the layers are all preserved, so if I decide I want to tweak a picture in the future, I can pick things up right where I left off.  Once you save your picture as a JPEG or in another format, you merge all the layers in to one, and you can not go back to make changes to the individual layers.

     Next Up:  How to create a sunset picture with KAPOW!

The Accidental Photographer

     One of the favorite images I have of my Dad is of him with a baseball cap barely resting on his head.  It is if someone threw a baseball cap across a room, and it just so happened to land on his head.  Anyone else would have had the hat on straight and tilted upwards just right, but not him - he marched to the beat of a different drummer.

     In many ways, my favorite photography technique is much like that.  It is though I take a picture and just so happen to capture something interesting.  I avoid all the rules and techniques I learned in my photography classes, and instead I just take a picture for the sake of taking a picture.  No rules - just a rogue photographer doing things his own way.

     Primarily I use my iPhone 4S to do this, but I have used my beloved Pentax for this and it works just as well.  The iPhone works great for this because it is easy to carry and you do not attract any unwanted attention when you take a picture.  Carry around a big SLR camera with a lens and everyone wants to get in your business.

     When I use this technique, the idea is to not take the perfect picture, but to take numerous pictures over the course of the day and see how they turn out at the end of the day - see if there is a diamond in the rough.  Some days I might take 200+ pictures using this technique, and I might only end up with one good picture.  Typically I use this technique though, and wind up with terrific pictures I would have never been able to take otherwise.  You see, in photography school we are taught all the basics of photography, so years later we find ourselves taking nicely framed pictures of landscapes and flowers while using the Rule of Thirds.  The Rule of Thirds is great when you take your vacation pictures, and pictures of Grandma, but after a while your portfolio will lack freshness.  It will look boring to you and to everyone who sees it.

     Break away from what you were taught in photography class and try just taking pictures for the sake of taking pictures.  What you will come up with will be a nice little surprise.  I started doing this a couple years ago, and now some of my favorite pictures are ones that I “accidentally” took.

     For example, the picture below is one I took while driving in east Texas.  I saw something colorful and interesting while at a gas station, but with cars driving by constantly I was unable to get a good shot.  Plus I was in a hurry to leave for an appointment.  All I had was time to take one quick shot.  I did not frame the shot, hold the camera straight, and I did not even look to see what I was taking a picture of - I just pointed my iPhone at what I was interested in and snapped a picture.  It was only later as I looked at all the pictures I took that day over dinner, that I realized I caught a really interesting picture.  

The original picture - nice, but it is lacking some pizazz.

     The original picture is interesting, but lacks some punch to it.  In photography, not everything has to always be sharp, focused, and under control - sometimes it is okay to have something out of focus, sometimes it is okay to have the colors explode, and sometimes it is okay to have a picture that is crooked.  If I had stopped to focus the picture, make sure it was straight, and followed the Rule of Thirds, I would have completely missed the warmth and whimsical nature of the picture.

     I imported the photo in to Photoshop to set the image size and pixels, then imported the picture in to a new program I had, called Tiffen Dfx.  Dfx will do everything that Photoshop will do, however it has presets you can use to save a lot of time.  I love the program and it works great for what I want to do in photography.

     And what I want to do is create pictures that are visually interesting, colorful and different.  Afterall, like my Dad, I march to the beat of a different drummer.  I love pop culture, comics, and all those things we take for granted - like an Icee sign.  I like the dirt and oil stains in the parking lot, and I love how everything leans to one side because I took the photograph while moving.

The final picture - now it has some pop to it and screams KAPOW!

     In short, I love the picture for all the imperfections.  For me, it is a perfect picture.  And it does not follow any of the rules I learned in photography.


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Almost Heaven

The original photograph without any adjustments.

     My favorite picture is titled, Almost Heaven.  I know the name is not very original on my part, but the opportunity presented itself as I drove along the highway near Greenville, Texas one afternoon.  At the time, I was there for a month-long work detail and as I drove up and down this highway each day for my job I got to know the area very well.  I had taken my Pentax K100 (digital SLR)  with me for my trip and kept it in the car each day just in case I saw something photo-worthy.

     I am naturally drawn to old dilapidated buildings, anything rusty, old cars, and things most people would not waste their time trying to take a picture of.  Luckily, the Greenville, Texas area - about an hour east of Dallas - is full of old decaying barns, farmland, rusty tractors, old cars still being used, and lots of things only I would find photo-worthy.  

     That is the fun thing about combining photography with Photoshop - the picture itself does not have to be pretty to begin with, it just needs to be somewhat interesting.  I am a big believer in that just about any picture is somewhat salvageable.  The picture does not even have to be good - it can be shot at a poor angle, poorly lit, crooked, in motion, full of noise and even out of focus, but if there is something interesting about it, something good can come out of that picture.  I take pictures like that constantly - I even go out of my way trying to take a bad picture, just to see what I can do with it.  Sometimes that is the fun and the challenge - trying to make something of nothing... trying to make something out a picture others might delete from their computer.

     Which brings me to the picture, Almost Heaven.  As I drove along the highway that day I saw ranch after ranch after ranch, all with a unique name.  I was not necessarily looking to take a picture of a ranch, but I was hoping to see an old car, an old rundown building, or something ironic - for that I would have stopped the car to take a picture.  And then it clicked - a ranch titled, Almost Heaven.  I just happened to be in the right place at the right time - the perfect name for a ranch, a pretty spring day, and thick green grass billowing in the breeze.  By the time I saw it, I had to turn around and drive a couple of  miles out of my way just to take a picture.  But once I was in front of the sign I saw how perfect it all was.  I was happy to be in the right place at right time to catch the image and I was anxious to get back home from my trip to check it out in Photoshop.  

     When I finally did open it up in Photoshop, I was very disappointed to see that my perfect shot was not so perfect, and was actually drab and washed out.  In its original state, it was nothing worth looking at twice, other than it had a nice ironic title.  It had been an overcast day that day, but at the time, it all seemed much prettier.  Convinced that I had a great picture that was worthy of my time, I spent several days working with the picture to see what I could do with it.  I knew Photoshop, but I was not anything that resembled an expert.  I knew how to give the picture some pizazz, but the picture needed more than that - it needed an extreme makeover.

     That is when I came up with the idea of removing the sky and putting in a sky that was worthy of the title.  I did not have any “sky” pictures in my small portfolio, so rather than just stick a “sky” in there from a picture I already had, I decided to put the picture on hold.  What I decided to do was to focus on taking pictures of the sky and clouds as the weather warranted.  Luckily living in Texas presents that opportunity on a daily basis, so it did not take long for me to have the perfect shot of a cloud in a pretty blue sky.  But it is hard to take the right shot of a sky, as we only see clouds from down below, or off in the distance.  Once again, I was lucky enough to live in a very hilly area of Texas so that I could take pictures of clouds at the right angle, rather than trying to shoot upwards to catch primarily the bottom of a could.

     It did not take long for me to come up with the perfect picture of a cloud in a blue sky to go along with my picture of the Almost Heaven ranch.  Combining the two was not as difficult as I thought, though it did take some effort to get rid of the sky along the tree tops and leaves.

     What I did was focus on each picture separately.  

     First, I focused on the Almost Heaven ranch picture by bringing out the perfect amount of green, and brightening up the white in the sign and fence.  In certain parts of the sign and fence I had to use the Clone tool in Photoshop to get rid of the rust, and in other parts of the picture I had to use the Clone tool to remove a building in the far background.  Bringing out the green in the grass was not difficult using Curves and Levels, but figuring out what would balance out the blue sky I intended to put in the background was, as the colors needed to work together.  Deleting the washed out white sky was a challenge where the sky met the trees.  I used the Lasso tool to remove the majority of the sky quickly, then came back in with the Eraser tool.  I adjusted the Opacity and Flow for the Airbrush Eraser to give the area a blended opacity where the sky met the trees.  At a certain point I was unable to delete the sky without removing individual leaves at the tree tops, so what I decided to do was to use the Clone too to add individual leaves back in to the tree tops.  This worked out well and helped balance out the abruptness and the hard edge that the Eraser tool gave.  At this point I was finished with the Almost Heaven part of the picture.

     Second, I focused on coming up with the best cloud picture.  The area the cloud would fit in to was such that not every cloud picture would work, so I soon found myself going back out to take pictures of more clouds.  Thanks to this project, I now have hundreds of pictures of clouds and blue skies to use in other pictures.  But I digress.  I found the perfect cloud picture, then worked to make the prettiest blue sky and the whitest clouds.  I then inserted the sky in to the background, moved the clouds around til I had just the perfect amount of blue sky and white clouds, and decided I had completed the picture.

     The result is my perfect picture that hangs on my office wall.  Every time I look at it I am reminded of a beautiful summer day, lost loved ones, and how we all need to create our own, Almost Heaven.  I do not currently offer this picture for sale at my website, http://industrialstrengthphotography.zenfolio.com/   but expect to add it in the near future.

The completed photograph after being introduced to Photoshop.

Plane flying in to a house - Being in the right place at the right time.

     My first camera was a Pentax SLR K1000 I received for my 12th birthday.  I had rode my bicycle down to Service Merchandise each weekend for months prior, to look at their selection of cameras, try the different cameras and ask the salesmen questions.  I picked the Pentax because it was among the least expensive, looked well-built, and my favorite salesman really liked it.  

     Just because I had picked it did not mean I would get it, but I had asked my Dad if I could buy one with the money I had saved from mowing yards and he mentioned that perhaps I should wait til Christmas, if not til my birthday that came less than two months later.

     Christmas came and went without a camera, so when my birthday finally arrived I was incredibly excited with each gift I opened.  My last gift was a heavy, yet odd-shaped package.  Unwrapping it I found a bulky black purse-like bag - just the thing a pre-teen guy wanted.  My little sister quickly told me the bag was from her, and to look inside.  Feeling awkward about looking in to a purse given to a boy, I found what the bag really was - a camera bag for the new Pentax K1000 my Dad and Stepmom put inside the bag.

     Everyone that knew me knew I was creative by nature, as I drew pictures and wrote stories constantly, but my new camera opened up a whole new world to me.  I was just a typical 12 year old - the kid with chocolate brown hair and gold streaks, riding on his mustard yellow dirt bike with a black bulky camera bag.  

     And no, I told all my friends, it was not a purse - it was a bad-ass black leather camera bag that just happened to look like a purse.

     I took pictures constantly, and by the time I started high school I was excited for the opportunity to take photography courses.  I chose black and white photography, as color photography seemed so cumbersome and time consuming.  Lots of steps of mixing separate colors, monitoring the time, chemicals - gee, I just wanted to take pictures.  Black and white photography, however, seemed a bit easier to understand - composing a picture with the different color gradients, and then standing in a room lit with a red light to wind film on a spool and submerse in chemicals.  I grew confident in my abilities to develop film and make prints - around the school campus everyone would see me with my Pentax, my bad-ass black camera bag that looked like a purse, and a big black arm strap with PENTAX written in red letters.  

     My first taste of success came when I created what became known as the “Plane flying in to a house” picture.  Shortly after I received my driver’s license at the age of 16, I was soon off to travel around town to take pictures.  One day I found myself across the street from an old WWII landing strip that the Navy was currently using for touch-and-go landings for practice by their new Navy pilots.  I had a couple rolls of 36 exposure film, so I tried to make each shot count.  One roll I devoted to shooting the planes coming in for a landing.  Directly across the street was a large plot of farm land, rows of grain about two feet tall, and an old dilapidated farmhouse with a palm tree out front.  The farmhouse had no paint on it, some windows were broken or the screens were coming off, and the house appeared to be condemned.  I stood directly in front of the house and took a dozen or so pictures with the farmhouse to left side of the frame, leaving an open area of nothing but rows of grain, to the right side of the frame.  By itself the picture looked off kilter, as it was not centered on the subject - the house - like I had been taught to do in my photography courses.  

     Back in the lab at school, I developed my film and had a perfect negative of a plane coming in for a landing with nothing but pale blue skies surrounding it, along with a nice crisp shot of an old weathered wood house.  I sandwiched the two negatives together precisely so as to create a final print - one which looked like I just happened to be in the right place at the right time - moments from impact.  How could I have possibly been in the right place at the right time to take such a miraculous shot?  

     I made a large 11x 14 black and white print, hand-cut a mat for it, and turned it in to my teacher for an assignment.  Within a few days she came up to me to ask me about the print.  She was curious to find out what happened to the house, was anyone hurt, how I happened to be there, and why she had not heard anything about the accident in the news.  I sheepishly explained to her that I had created the picture in the darkroom, and that both the plane and the house were doing just fine.

     To my surprise, my teacher loved the picture and encouraged me to enter it in to the upcoming local art exhibition at the local coliseum.  I entered the picture, and once the exhibition opened I went to see how my work was perceived.  Row after row I walked, looking at all the nicely mounted photographs of fellow students.  Each had a title, a photographer name, their grade and their school.  Pictures were given titles like, “Sunrise”, “Sunset”, “Butterflies”, or “Ducks”.  And there was my picture, self-explanatory - “Plane flying in to a house”.

     I won 3rd place.  It was the first photography contest I ever entered, and it gave me enough confidence to last 30 years.

     And it is the reason I am writing this blog today - what positive thing will you do today that will impact your life for the next 30 years?


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