The past few weeks, I have been working on some senior portraits for some people. First off, I did some portraits for a friend around September, however, he came back to me and wanted some more prints, so I worked with him and his mom to get those ordered and processed adequately. It ended up taking quite a bit of time, getting all of the images processed to the right size, etc.

I also had another student come to me for senior portraits. Gabby wanted some new ones, because her other studio was too expensive to get graduation announcement photos, so she wanted different ones for those. So she had me take some for her. We went to Hayden Lake and got some great ones down by the water. We decided that since so many people go downtown for portraits, that we would try some other areas.

Out of the 7 final edits, the first two (above) are my favorites, but there are some others shown below.

The photography portion consisted of my 50D, and my 50mm f/1.8 (favorite lens). I brought along my flash, as the lighting really wasn’t prime, so I supplemented it with the flash. I think that with the flash, the lighting turned out great in the end.

In post processing, the editing consisted of importing to Photoshop (CS5 FTW), processing from RAW, and minimal editing. She complained that her old ones seemed over-edited, so I was sure to avoid that.

Finally, I have below the contact sheets with the images from the shoot.

In other news, I have downloaded a trial version of Photoshop CS5, and I used it for editing my photos for the last few weeks. Unfortunately, I have grown to like it too much, and will be sad to give it up. I don’t see myself upgrading from CS4 anytime soon, but it was fun to try out the newest version. Although there isn’t too much that I would use constantly, there are little differences around, such as the MiniBridge, which is actually quite useful. Another feature, that I haven’t used yet, but really want to, is the HDR Pro. I have seen videos, and really want to compare it to Photomatix.

Another thing that happened was that Sadii decided to give me her Wacom tablet, a Graphire4. I used this for the past week and have grown to love it quite a lot. There is something about writing with a pen, vs a mouse or trackpad that is fun. It also has a mouse that comes with it, so maybe I’ll start using a mouse more often.

Surrealism: a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential ofthe unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.
Oxford American Dictionary

This week’s project has proved to – quite possibly – be the most difficult project to date. Unfortunately, with all of the work, it is still not my strongest work.

I started out my search for inspiration at Worth1000.com, a site that hosts Photoshop competitions which lead to lots of surreal photos. While browsing, I found an image that was utterly stellar, Kitty Attack. This image was so inspiring to me, and being a cat person, I decided to try to replicate the image in my own way.

From Worth1000.com

The first step was for me to find an image of a bridge. For the original image, they chose the Golden Gate Bridge, but as I had no plans to travel to San Francisco any time soon, I felt that was out of the question – and it would really feel too much like copying. Where I’m from, North Idaho, there is a rather large bridge that spans over Lake Pend Oreille in Sandpoint, ID that is 1.3mi long. This bridge is rather famous among locals here, so I logically chose that bridge for the shot. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a superb image of said bridge, so I tried another bridge adjacent to the original one. Although it was not the well-known one, it is very similar in looks. Below is my shot for the background of the image…

Sandpoint Bridge

The image is actually composed of three individual exposures to get a good look to the image. The sky was totally blown out if the bridge was exposed correctly, while the water was dark. So I took three exposures, each exposed for the three main elements of the photo: the sky, the bridge, and the water. I combined these in Photoshop and this set up the background of the image.

Next, I started adding some destruction to the image: First, I moved some of the pylons down into the water, then warped the elements of the bridge, and finally, I collapsed a main portion of the bridge. I originally looked on the internet for tutorials on how to create ruins from images and came across this tutorial on how to make Modern Ruins, but was unable to do most of the stuff in the image due to lack of destruction in Coeur d’Alene. But I was able to use some of the techniques and inspiration from the tutorial.

Sandpoint Bridge: Destroyed

After I finished totally annihilating the bridge, I went to photograph my cat, so he could be doing the destruction. From my experience, felines really do not make the best of models. They really resist anything to do with sitting when told, and doing the things you ask them (even if you ask nicely). Then when you add in strobes, they just totally go ballistic. This was no exception. I chose my cat, Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov, to do the modeling. At first he totally resisted, but after I introduced a food bowl, a toy, cat treats, a green laser pointer, and another human to restrain him***; he cooperated. Below, you are able to see both cats lazily chilling there.

Setup for Cat Photography

Cats... just being themselves.

After coaxing my cat to be playful with string, laser pointers, and other toys, he cooperated for about 30 seconds. I finally got some good photos. Below is the image I chose for the project.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov - My cat

Once I edited the image in Photoshop, I was able to place it into the document. I placed him behind the bridge, and did some really difficult and time consuming masking to get it to look like he was both behind the bridge, and partially submerged in the water. Below is an image of what it looked like after I added the cat.

Micky behind bridge

Now that the main elements were in the image, I was able to make the cat do some very evil things. First, I added some green burning lasers coming from his eyes to give him laser vision. I aimed these at the bridge and then proceeded to modify them to look more like lasers. It was actually quite simple to add them, really. First, I drew two lines using the line tool at about 5px wide on lime green. Then I added a noisy glow in a similar green and turned down the opacity. That was it. Next, I figured it was only logical if the green lasers were doing damage, otherwise Mikhail would never have dreamed of wasting such precious energy on them. So, I downloaded some grinder spark brushes from DeviantArt. I added some nice sparks coming from the bridge and overlaid an orange and red gradient over them. Next, I added some speckling to them to create more tiny sparks. This is where that “Fire” comes from on the bridge. I realized that with fire, there is smoke. So I created a new layer and brushed some white over the layer at 10 percent on a hard edged brush. I made billowing smoke, but then applied a rather harsh gaussian blur to tone them down. Then I turned the opacity down quite a bit to make it clear. Next, I repeated the same thing, but with black smoke for right next to the sparks.

Finally, I realized that where there is destruction in water, there is a splash. So I used the same brush set, but put it in the water and overlaid the water pattern (from the water in the image) over the splash. I applied some speckle to it, gaussian blurred the texture and was done.

At 25 layers, 4 separate images, and many hours of work, I was finally done with the project. I estimate that I spent nearly 16 hours on this project. Although these are just estimates, they are very close to what I spend on the project. I am disappointed that it really didn’t turn out as good as I hoped, but I am still happy with it. In fact, just writing this entry alone, at nearly 1200 words, it is a full-blown essay. From the exporting, color correction, resizing, and writing, I have worked on this for about 4 hours overall.

• Research: 30 min
• Bridge Photography: 2 hrs.
• Editing bridge w/ background: 2 hrs.
• Photographing cat: 2 hrs.
• Photoshopping: 6 hrs.
• Blog entry, including creating web thumbs: 4 hrs.

Below are the contact sheets for the project. You may notice that there are some from the mountain, this is simply because I was originally going to have the cat attacking the lodge at Schweitzer Mountain, but it didn’t work out as planned.

*** No animals were harmed in the production of this image.

Darkness – the absence of light. Our eyes trick us during the night. According to our eyes, there is no light – no color – nothing. Photography opened up a view of the dark world, known more frequently as Night.

The above image was shot on the dock at the Honeysuckle Marina on Hayden Lake in Idaho. It was nearly black, but with the help of a slow shutter speed, I was able to capture the colors of the bay adjacent to the docks. As you can see, the lake has started freezing over due to the incredibly cold weather recently.

Exposure:

• Shutter Speed: 30 sec.
• Aperture: f/9
• ISO: 100

This week, I was feeling incredibly uninspired so I had some difficulty coming up with ideas for this week. So I did the logical thing… I did a motion blur of the US-95 and Prairie Ave. intersection. I drove down to the bank next to the intersection, and busted out my tripod and 50D, set the exposure, and out popped this masterpiece (you can bow to me later, I know, you’re just in shock right now).

Exposure:

• Shutter: 20 sec.
• Aperture: f/22
• ISO: 100

I was experimenting with some new filters this week, so after converting from RAW, I threw some Topaz on this pic and then changed the blending mode to soft light to reduce the effects so it wouldn’t be way too fake. Then I ran some high pass (desatted, on softlight) over the image to give it that nice over-edited look.

Finally, I made a fancy animation, because thats the cool thing to do.

Exposure same as above.

While I was out, I shot a panorama of Hayden Lake. This is below.
[RAW]

View Panorama Larger[/RAW]

This panorama consists of 6 images, taken at 30 seconds each, meshed together with photoshop. Because I was out on the dock at Honeysuckle Marina, there was some slight camera movement in the photo, this isn’t too noticeable at smaller sizes, but if you view it full size it becomes more prominent.

Finally, here is the contact sheet.

[RAW]

Stop Light Before and After[/RAW]

1st image

Downtown Coeur d’Alene, ID. HDR effect to get the vivid colors. Approximately 1 minute shutter.

Map of photo

2nd image

Photo of lake Coeur d’Alene in CDA, ID. A little HDR was used with Photomatix in this photo as well. I ended up submerging my camera in the process of taking this photo. Lukily no damage was done to the camera. This photo was used in my Junior Class yearbook at Coeur d’Alene High School. The caption in the yearbook reads: “Scott Sturges glided through the water gracefully like a wild seahorse and jumped out and snapped this glorious landscape of Coeur d’Alene Lake.”

Map of lake photo

Senior portrait created for Josh Stevens. The second one is one that he edited and ended up using.

Map of Tubbs Hill