First, to whomever of you is going to read my post this week, I must say that I will get more organized in my blog...soon!!! Just to keep you in the know, this week's work (aka, fun) is to be found in the following posts: "3 portraits...or so", "last of nature's letters", "more of nature's letters" and "nature's o". There are a few extraneous pics mixed in -- a cropped version of Q that I didn't really care for, an extra self-pic and a replacement for the emda logo that I had submitted some time ago (somehow, the first logo shadow letters ghosted themselves into nothingess...a mystery. An aside on the logo submissions, I wanted to create something that would copy well in black and white or in color.) With that preface out of the way, let's talk about Alpha Pic Soup.
I had so much fun this week looking for letters that I nearly forgot the other portrait part of the project. Though I was seeing the alphabet everywhere, I decided to limit myself to only those letters nature gave me, no man-made structures, inventions or fabrications qualified. I also decided to get all but one (the i-palm) in my back yard garden. In order, as you scroll down the blog, you first find the bee in "last of nature's letters" where between shadows and plants you find constructions of H, V, L, X, T and E. Ironically, I was at first so tuned into patterns on the bee, I neglected to see all the letters he was sitting next to. In "more of nature's letters", there is the i-palm in grand scale, the profusion-of-j's bloom (each individual petal is j-shaped), the i-calendula in petite scale, B-tomatoes and the Q-hollyhock, which is somewhat backwards, i know. When I rotated it to be letter perfect, however, I didn't like it and so let it's inspiration to Q stand as it was. "Nature's o" was my first pic. I got down under the leaning sunflower heads and took the pic looking skyward to do their flawless 'o' shape justice. To get the best light, I moved myself around each of the subject letters. None of these pictures were altered in any way, not to say that they couldn't use some help, but I was more focused, hee hee, on the camera for this part of the project. Then, the photoshop fun began. Using the sunflower pic, I started playing with layer adjustments. First, some brightness/contrast, then some levels, but while playing, I happened upon the single color fill adjustments and got away from improving the picture, instead moving towards creating a piece inspired by the picture, itself, an inspiration of 'o's, an inspiration of inspirations...hahaha! Probably, most importantly, I finally figured out how quick select works...I think. The quick select tool selects all the pixels in your image of the color pixel that you click on. This was a great moment of enlightenment!!! (let's not dwell on me finding that out this late in the quarter) Using that understanding, I created the altered version of sunflowers with fill layers and certain quick selections, such as parts of the flower centers, leaves and sky.
Time to move on to portraits, if I wanted to make deadline! Self-pic, furry beast and my son unawares to my plans. Starting with the self-picture as it was, I just started applying different adjustments to see what they would do. Again, I found something nifty -- threshold something or other. Applying this resulted in the black and white graphic novel looking image. In the picture of my dog, Spot, brightness/contrast and levels layer adjustments were huge improvements to the original dark picture. Hue/saturation adjustments added some fun. I particularly like the way the wall behind the roses became colored. Finally, on my son's pic, I played with the usual layer adjustments and then tweeked the perspective ever so slightly giving it more of an upward tilt and side to side shift. Added some cropping and called it done. I included the alteration pre-perspective shift and post-perspective shift with cropping. If you look carefully, you can see it. Changing the perspective tweeks the picture in such a way that cropping becomes necessary...the more you change it, the more you have to crop, or so it seems at this point.
Each part of the project offered many learning opportunities, so I'm not sure which benefitted me more. I do know that, in between bouts of doubts, frightful frights and uncertainties, I am having a great time and can hardly call this stuff homework. From working on these pictures, both in the taking and manipulating, I have vowed to become more proficient at using my camera and PS. Mountains and mountains to learn yet!!!
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