30 in 30.

It’s been a lot of fun but I do not think I could keep up the pace as a regular thing.  Perhaps I’ll have to make September my 30 in 30 month, to get me back to work after the summer.

Not really an image today.  A collage of images, instead.  I’m trying to connect some of the dots among the things I’ve done this month, as well as before.  I call it Water and Wood.

We found a compromise when I started carrying my camera with us on our tag sale expeditions.  I’ve now shot thousands of frames of fascinating collections of garbage, heaped in all sorts of ways.

The image below is from one of these expeditions.  It is a pile of used wooden stools.  The flow of the tumble-down pile reminds me of a wooden waterfall.

One joy of using Photoshop is its ability to allow the user to take “snapshots” of variations on a theme.  Here are a number of variations that resulted from my work on this image.  While they show the path I took to my final image, you may decide that you would have stopped before I did.

The effect I was working toward was a more oriental, figure on ground effect.  From here, I needed to darken the shadows while lightening or maintaining the colored highlight areas.  For the PS geeks, in this step I just applied a curve, boosting the highlights and dropping the shadows.

The brightest of the highlights are beginning to wash out.  Some may like the effect but it was not what I was aiming for, so I moved on.

I continued to darken the shadows while bringing down the top of the highlights.

For the PS geeks, I used a different set of curves and, on the fly, used my existing mask of the shadow area to cut out a copy of the shadows, placing the shadows on top of the image and using a blending mode of multiply.  There are more graceful ways of doing the same thing but I anticipated using a layer effect to smooth the transition between the colored areas and the flat shadow.  To do so, I needed a layer with its edges at the edge of the shadow.

I’m getting close here.  I’ve got the flat black ground but I don’t like the rough edge where it meets the chipped paint on the stools.

From here, I smoothed out the edges of the shadow area and created some visual interest and the boundary between the highlight and shadow.

For the PS geeks, I tried working with a layer effect but did not find anything that pleased me.  I then stamped the image, used a cutout filter, and blended only the dark part of the layer at about half opacity.  I creates flatter appearance that I was seeking, as well as having the happy side effect of creating geometric shadows on the stools, further flattening the image.

At this point, I was pretty sure I was where I wanted to stop.  I was a little bothered by the balance of figure and ground, particularly on the right side.  As a result, I decided to compress the image and see if I like a different balance between the figure and the ground.

To do this, I used a really fun tool in Photoshop call “content aware scale,”  It allows me to accordion an image with minimal change to its components.  If you compare the red stool below with the red stool above, you will see that it has changed shape.  It was the stool most effected by the change.

While this result appears more stable, when I look at it next to the earlier iteration, I find that I like the taller version better.  It creates a more tumble-down feeling, which is part of what I was aiming to do.

You may have stopped sooner or may like the compressed version better.  Again, a joy of Photoshop is I have both versions, can paste them on a wall and look at them for a while.  It’s sort of like doing two paintings at once.

Finally, I love zoming in and looking around at the pixel-eye level.  Here is an interesting view from the center of the pile.

When I averaged the initial frames, the sun’s reflection washed out the area around it.  I had to fuss it back to an acceptable level.  If you look, you will see that its gray is inconsistent with the its surroundings.  After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to darken the existing image, I resorted to mixing neutral gray into the sun spot.  (In PS terms, I added a gray fill layer, masked it to the sun spot, and then reduced opacity).  With more time — not something I have today — I’d work on getting the color in the sun spot closer to that of the marsh water to its left, so it did not seem so artificial.

Just a little Camera Raw processing and a bit of a crop.

I was taking a walk at the local reservoir when I saw this rock under the water, all dappled with light.  I talked myself into the idea that if I was real steady, I might catch the light on the rock while making the water surface disappear by averaging a group of frames.  It works well with streams, why not with a reservoir?

NOT.

When I got back to Photoshop, the initial images were a mess.  I had waded out into the water until it was around my knees.  With nothing on which to brace and the water sloshing in my view finder, I wiggled and wobbled.  The frames were all over the place.  I tried mashing the frames together anyway and came up with this super soft focus effect.  Not my intent but a happy accident.

For the PS geeks.  Yesterday I spoke of using a rock or a stick as an “index” when shooting multiple frames handheld.  In this case, I was out in the water with no index object available.  I tried to convince myself that the stone would serve as its own index.  Small chance.

While the stone didn’t move much, its image on the surface danced around in the waves.  The frames were like snowflakes: no two alike.  In the end, I hand-aligned the layers, which was dodgy because I had no better information than Photoshop.  It was a “subjective” alignment.

When run through Stack Mode Mean, the effect is the average shape of the rock as it appeared on the surface, subject to some extra fuzziness from my hand-aligned layers.  If I had been set up with a tripod, then alignment would not have been an issue and the rock here would be its true average appearance on the surface.  I cannot predict whether that image would be more or less interesting than this one.  It should at least allow better composition.  I have cropped heavily the right side of the image to hide a number of sins caused by the hand-alignment of the layers.

What I enjoy about this image, however, is the light combined with the waves to allow ghosts of the surface bubbles to appear as faint rings in the image.  In order to see if I can control these effects, I plan to reshoot the image.  (Yes, Virginia.  This time I’ll bring the tripod.)  The reservoir, however, changes with the rain.  Just now, this rock is under about 10 feet of water.

Today’s image is just such an inversion.  I enjoy it for its suggestion of a seashore, starfish, and beach-side flotsam.

Trolling around at high magnification turns up some fun pixel-eye views.  Here is one.

My starting point looks quite different.  As with many of my 30 in 30 images here, it started as a set of 15 frames of moving water, shot near the edge of a stream.  When loaded into Photoshop, and after using the Stack Mode Mean function, the 15 frames made a single image that looked like this:

What a dud, eh?

With the stones at the bottom of the image out of focus and little or no light reflecting off the stream bed, there was little I expected to salvage from the image.  I was about to toss it on the scrap heap when, on a lark, I inverted the colors in the image.  The result was playful.  In addition, the inverted colors made the image more abstract and caused the failed focus to recede.  I played with it some more to see if I could get past the focus issues and still come up with something interesting.  The lack of light in the water worked to my advantage in the inversion, giving me more light than less.

For the PS geeks, when I am shooting multiple frames of moving water without a tripod, aligning the frames poses a challenge.  Typically, my workflow is to load the initial frames into individual layers, use the auto-align function on the layers, collapse the aligned layers into a smart layer, and then use the Stack Mode Mean function to create the long exposure effect.  If there is nothing but moving water in the image, then Photoshop does not have enough common data among the layers to automatically align them.  As a result, when I am without a tripod, I will include a static object, such as a rock or branch, in the frame.  I do so even if I plan to crop it out later.  The static object serves the same function as an index mark in color woodblock or silkscreen printing.  It allows Photoshop align the layers accurately, even when my camera drifted one way or another.

Here is a collage style image that uses the same technique in an urban setting.  The pink poster and the tent in the background serve as the index, although I suspect the grass alone would have been enough.  All the people walking around the area were averaged out, turning into “smoke.”  The woman and the figures near the tent who are partially obscured were created by placing one of the original frames back over the top of the averaged group, then masking out the portions that I did not want to show.  My experiment here was to see if I could create the visible image of the woman against the ghosts of the others.