Watermark

Unfortunately, I had a number of my photos used without my permission and without acknowledgment during the 2008 football season. So....I created a tradename (Rock Bottom Studio) and logo that I can place on all of my photos before I upload them. Will it stop folks from "stealing" them? No.....but it could be helpful in litigation. Here is a photo that I took during the big fire at All Fired Up in Barre City back in October of 2008.

cloning

here's a little piece I put together for a friend when I shot her Senior Portraits. i'll upload the original, full fame shots and the final result so you can see what I did.

clone and paint

hopefully this is acceptable this week. fighting off a nasty case of the flu and not spending too much time in front of a computer. For my first example, I took a photo of country music singer Aaron Tippin that I took last summer. I really wanted to emphasize his guitar....so left that in color and changed the rest to black and white. kind of painting I think....painting with the eraser. i uploaded the original and the edit.

A personal note

This has been a really tough week for me....my good friend passed away from a cardiac arrest on Wednesday morning at the age of 32. His Mother gave me a place to stay when I was 14 and he was 7....and he was really like a little brother to me. We had grown apart over the last few years as I "grew up" and moved away from the bar scene that he still clung so tightly to. I mention this not for your sympathy....but as a reminder that we just never know when the last thing we said to someone may be the last chance we have to convey how we feel. Don't live to regret not saying or doing something...there are no guarantees that you'll have another chance.

Dodge Tool

Even though I have been using Photoshop for a number of years, I really have hardly ever much of its' potential and tools. My first try using the Dodge Tool with brighten the back of this archway so that the date would become visible. A person more experienced editing photos could also erase the car and totally change the photo. I tried but the result wasn't very good.

Filters

The first filter that I played with this week was called "Glowing Edges". I thought this shot from a car show of an old street rod with a flame paint job would make an interesting subject....and I think that I was right!



So...then I wanted to find a shot that might look cool using the Mosaic Tile filter. I settled on this waterfall but I'm not sure that it works as well as I would have liked. Since we had talked about mosaics last week, I stuck with it anyway.

More editing fun

I take a TON of photos, but I've always been a little afraid to do much more than crop them. Had some fun this week playing with some of the editing options in Photoshop CS2....not sure how often I'd use them, but it was fun to try them out! First....here's an edit of a shot I took a long time ago while taking the ferry across Lake Champlain. I like the original well enough....but I played with it a little and really liked the result I got using the "Neon Glow" option.



Next is a portrait I took of my son Cody....I still don't really know how I got the White Balance so wrong. I use a tool called the Expodisc to help set custom WB before every series of shots in changing lighting conditions. Apparently I got something wrong this time. And.....I didn't shoot in RAW even though I could have. DAMN!! Well, all I could do was play with the RGB levels and get it close to acceptable. Still not good enough to print I don't think, but it gives an idea of what can be done by hand....even by a hack.




Then I wanted to try something a little more challenging. I shot a John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band (the guys that did the soundtrack for the Eddie & The Cruisers movies) concert this summer and got a few really good shots. I liked this shot of Michael "Tunes" Antunes, Cafferty's sax player. Last week I posted a couple examples where I cut a player from one background and posted it onto another. So.....for this shot, I wanted to really make the person stand out on the same background I had cut him from. I found a cool way to do that, using the Artistic/Plastic Wrap option in CS2. I created a duplicate copy of the original and then applied the Plastic Wrap.. then I cut "Tunes" from the background using the eraser tool. Once I had that done cleanly, I dragged him back on to the original and covered his original position. Whatcha think?