Ceci*5

The Face of Ceci

Aiming for a more "painted" quality to the final photo.

[Photo Credit: Emily Gerst]

NES Art Repro: The Legend of Kage

Prints: Farm Fog

Back in October of last year, I went on the Hidden Studios Art Tour near Amherst in Wisconsin. That morning there was a heavy fog hanging in the air. Super ominous, but totally comforting at the same time. It was one of those fall days that was damp and cool, comfortable as long as I kept moving. "Crisp" would be a generous description. The damp gets into your bones if you sit still for too long. It was that kind of morning, something only a true child of the north can love.

One of the studio sites was in an old barn in the Amherst area. One of those barns that had tons of character to it that can only be carved into each plank by long exposure to the ever variable Wisconsin climate. I captured a few great shots and threw a cross process curve over the top of the images in Photoshop. Below are the resulting images, and the prints displayed fully framed in their new home in my living room. The images were printed on metallic paper stock which is brilliant in the right light, the photo below does not do them full justice.

Caricature: Patterson, jacked up on cake.

Carlo Cruisin with the Fam

Photo credit goes to Garrett Wilk. Second run using my new approach to pixel bending.

Oat Cakes

This is attempt number one in what will be a series of attempts to define a new approach for my photography. Taking a photo and carefully massaging it to have a more illustrated or painted quality to it. There is no magic Photoshop filter to achieve this. A bold new frontier in pixel bending (probably not though, I'm sure someone else has done it already or at least something similar). Since Photoshop CS2 is free from Adobe and I was too lazy to go downstairs to the mac, this was all accomplished in that super old Photoshop environment on PC laptop that does not have a calibrated monitor. I'm friggin living on the edge here folks.

I feel like the technique can probably be pushed quite a bit farther, but I'm pretty comfortable with this first attempt. More to come as this approach evolves.

Angry Coffee With Em

Long Exposures In the Middle of Nowhere.

The farther north you go from MKE, the more amazing the sky looks. My Powershot s95 is hardly capable of doing this sky proper justice.

Caricature Study: Andy

Senior Picture Project 2012: Part 2

Photos capture by Annette Jarnig.

The purpose of this project is to hook up some Highschool seniors with quality pictures that their families wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise. It has become a goofy standard in American culture to spend hundreds to thousands of hard earned dollars on Senior pictures. Not everyone can pull this off, but everyone deserves to have amazing pictures to be able to swap with the kids they have spent their entire educational career growing up along side.

Click to here to see Part 1.

Shown below, the final product. Mouse over the image to see the before (may take a moment to load).

Senior Picture Project 2012: Part 2

Photos capture by Annette Jarnig.

The purpose of this project is to hook up some Highschool seniors with quality pictures that their families wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise. It has become a goofy standard in American culture to spend hundreds to thousands of hard earned dollars on Senior pictures. Not everyone can pull this off, but everyone deserves to have amazing pictures to be able to swap with the kids they have spent their entire educational career growing up along side.

Click to here to see Part 1.

Shown below, the final product. Mouse over the image to see the before (may take a moment to load).

Caricature Study: Denny & Ryan

My Hero

Captian Jean Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise! DANCE PARTY!

Caricature Study: Spigmarious

Caricature Study: Ma & Pa

Caricature Study: Noah

Caricature Study: RWG

Cosplay Bonanza: Memory Versus Reality

The beauty of photoshoppery is the ability to make a digitally captured moment look exactly how you remember it, make the colors and mood just as vivid as it actually seemed. Digital devices lack the ability to truly capture what the human eye does let alone capture the awe of the moment. Here is a more in depth view of one of the shots pictured from last weeks post as I remember it versus how the moment actually captured.
[mouse over to see original capture]



Hardest part about shooting at a convention is that there are tons of people that get in the way and the back drop is a convention center... which is about the dullest backdrop possible. A plethora of wall mounted visual distractions and photo bombers. Two big background distractions that I was oblivious to when I snapped this shot was the mildly disgruntled man sitting up against the wall and the gray wall panel.

Of these Mass Effect cosplayers, the girl in blue on the right was the most impressive. The costume is well done, tons of amazing detail. When I looked at the original in detail after getting home from the convention, I noticed some things (aside from the background distractions) that detracted from my memory of the moment. The girl after a long day at the con had some of her makeup beginning to wear off, the headpiece was starting to come a bit undone, and her bra was sticking out a bit. This is the reality of the moment, but wasn't true to my memory and initial impression of the moment. A true naturalist would have left it as it was and could even argue that by "fixing it" I destroyed the original integrity of the moment... Ultimately, I can live with this since I was able to recapture the moment as I remembered it.

Cosplay Bonanza!

Any convention with cosplayers is an opportunity for guerilla photography. Tons of people running around in carefully crafted costumes that are anxious to show them off. If you are holding a camera all you need to do is make eye contact and they stop and pose. With GenCon 2012 right around the corner, I've been looking back on some of the shots I got last year..

One big issue I've had in the past was with there being multiple visual points of distraction that wound up in each shot. Still being quite the photography noob at this point (2011), my focus was just getting a good shot and not considering techniques I could have used to put more focus on my subject. So, I cleaned up in post. Even with all of the best intentions, a shot can still turn out less than ideal due to people getting in the way. Next post, I'll go into some detail on how I corrected some of these distractions and what my approach was. For now, enjoy a smattering of my favorite shots from GenCon 2011: