Showing posts with label post processing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post processing. Show all posts

30 July 2009

Ancient History (Zombies! Clones! Trespassing!)

I'm not really sure what made me think of it, but today I realized that I took a Digital Photography class junior year of high school. It was hell. There were about three of us in the class who actually cared — everyone else was just there to get an art credit — but the teacher took an immediate disliking to my being a smartass and promptly assigned me a horrible partner, showed nothing of mine in the gallery, and gave me a B. I'm still a bit angry about that. Guess I deserved it for being a smartass, though.

Anyways. I was going through these pictures and, while they're mostly attempts to be artsy while conforming to the lesson, there were a couple that I sort of thought were worth putting up here. I can't find the originals, so all I have are the resized/compressed Facebook versions. Sorry. They're around here somewhere and, if I find them, I'll put them up.

First, there's a theme project I did on "Urban Decay," which, technically speaking, isn't the most urban. I visited a then-abandoned (now-demolished... RIP) truck depot and the vestiges of an old house nearby, neither of which being anywhere near anything urban. For the most part, it's not really anything to write home about, but I like to put all of my adventures in breaking-and-entering up here, especially since the truck depot was leveled last fall.

Then we've got these lovely numbers I did for my portrait assignment. I own that mask. It is a wonderful mask. It frightens children.





Lastly, there's my final project. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew it was going to involve a box and a sword. Lacking a sword, I drove to Graham's house to borrow one. Because, really, if you need a sword, that's where you're going to go. He wasn't there, but Sam was. And then this just sort of happened. I happen to like it a lot, shoddy as the photoshoppery is (and my lack of a tripod). It's called, "Attack of the Clones!" If you can't see the slideshow, click here to get to the album.


08 July 2009

Overunder

I'm sick today. So, instead of doing anything productive, I learned new photo software!

Adobe Lightroom is awesome. If you take pictures, get Lightroom. I was using Picasa as a photo library, but Lightroom is easier and gives you much more control over organization and editing. I need to reorganize my library to work better with it, but it's oh so very shiny, really. Lightroom is like if Photoshop were iTunes, if that makes any sense.

I also got Noise Ninja which, well, reduces noise. It works very well, much better than Photoshop. Blurs images a bit, but Lightroom's clarity setting can fix that right up. Then, Photomatix, which makes HDR pictures. I need some more time to learn this stuff, but I have a general working knowledge right now.

There was a panorama I posted a while ago, and I don't think I ever linked to the software I used to make it. I used hugin. It's the best panorama stitcher around, as far as I've heard, and it's free. It's a little intimidating to use at first but, once you play with it a bit, it makes sense.

Enough of my talking. This photo is from Moab. It was my HDR guinea pig.

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Oh, and I'm hopefully going to make it back to the cement plant sometime this week. Fingers crossed.