Access Digital Photography

I’ve been working a lot at my desk lately, and every once in a while I just get a little sitr-crazy. Besides, I start feeling like I’ve got to get out and shoot. Sometimes, there’s just no place to go and no way to get there. Here’s the result of the last time that happened:

Trouble is, the neighborhood I’m renting my Panama City apartment in is a long way from most of the places I want to go. So lately I’ve been taking the local Diablo Rojo (Red Devil) buses. I’ll do another blog on them alone, soon. But they’re old school buses that only charge 25-cents to go anywhere they go. Beats the begonias out of cab fares. Trouble is, they tend to be full of underpaid people who’d love the chance to steal a camera. So I take along my trusty Olypus SP-350, which I’ve hung onto for years because it’s quite tiny, has all the right adjustments, and shoot RAW. And, it’s 8MP…enough definition to get me a nice 16×20 print…especially with a little help from Genuine Fractals and a good noise reduction filter. That’s if I don’t crank the ISO up over 200, mind you. Best of all, I can shove it into my front pants pocket where it’s invisible and I can protect it. Even when it can be seen, it doesn’t look nearly as valuable as a DSLR.

Lately, I’ve been discovering that, even in low light and with the help of some tone-mapping and artistic special effects, it can be a lot of fun to shoot strange things from strange angle, even when the ISO has to be cranked up, to “very grainy” and then turn them in to artsy abstracts that don’t look much like photographs at all. You saw one of those images at the top of this blog. That was made by just putting the shot through Topaz Adjusts’ “I feel Lucky” changes until I got something I liked.

The image below was made by I first combining two images using Photoshop’s Layer Blend Modes,  then experimenting with the Filter Gallery and combining artistic filters until I liked what I got.:

You don’t really need third-party filters to play with these ideas. I talk about them a lot because you can see the results quickly and the processes they employ would take a lot of time to do by hand. But don’t forget that there are lots of art filters and other effects built into Photoshop. Combine those with HDR techniques and layer Blend Modes and Lightroom presets and the possibilities become nearly endless.

The best part is, many times these treatments will create a mood or felling that’s much more like the experience of being there than what the more standard and literal techniques capture. After all, our minds are constantly “interpreting” what our eyes see.

Please feel free to leave comments and questions. I love to help and I love your help. Who knows, you may even give me an idea or two.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Digital Photography News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.