City - Little Rock State - AR Country - United States
About
One of my room mates had a cat that used up eight of its lives back when God was still in diapers, and had nery a tooth left in its head, and it finally finished its ninth life yesterday. My other room mate, Michael, was out in the back yard digging a grave for it when I decided to take this picture of him. I was just trying out the Elan 7n that I got yesterday, wanting to see what its flash metering was like, so I was taking different kinds of pictures in different lighting situations. This one was taken a whole foot from his head, with a Canon 540EZ speedlite set to underexpose by one stop, with the 18mm wide-angle panel flipped down. It managed to expose him evenly and in keeping with the existing sunlight, which was low to the horizon to his right (camera left), even from such a close distance. I used a 20mm lens because I wanted the distortion that you see in the image...not sure it gave the image anything, but I always liked how it distorts apparent distance. Anyway, just thought I'd post it to see what others think. *shrug* :) Thanks for looking.
Oh my. I hadn't even noticed that this thing got BIP. I was going through my album to see what pictures, if any, I wanted to remove from it, and I saw something about awards on the left side of the screen, and when I clicked it, this picture popped up. I'm so ignunt...I got it months ago, and I just now realized it.
I apologize to the staff if I've come across as ungrateful. I honestly just didn't realize I'd gotten anything, 'cause I've never received any sort of "award" for any of my work before. I just post to try to get critiques that'll help me improve, or to show people what can be done with a camera, and how, 'cause, even though I'm no expert, I'm no longer a beginner, either, so I feel I might be able to teach someone something along the way. :) But, thanks for the BIP award, y'all. I feel all giddy. :)
Actually, Michael has proven to be rather photogenic, and his overall appearance, I believe, will lend itself well to many different experiments with what I can do to a picture of a person. He's a Pagan, with all the ritual attire that goes along with it, so I'll see what we can do with some of that. I would REALLY like to photograph one of his group's outdoor ceremonies, but I'm not sure they would allow it. However, I'm going to try. Could make for some interesting shots. Thanks for the info on how you made the image you did. :) I just did some burning around the edges for the vignette, and burned his eyes in underneath, then lowered the midtones with levels, and did the color balance to be a rather saturated brown. Not as involved and creative as what you did, but...I tried. :) Take care, and happy shooting!
less lightness burned the head and body irregularly burned the eyes( above and bellow them) burned around him to make vigneting duplicated background layer (layer1) slight gaussian blur layer 1 deleted the eyes and hand in layer 1 duplicated background layer (layer2) unsharp mask to layer 2 - to get the eyes white deleted everything but the eyes in layer2 flatten image filter-distort-pinch to take out the wide lens distortion, so he looks more skinny
eheh I guess it was just asking for it. :)
Hope this is of some service to you... I guess... hope that all your friends don't start looking like vampires from now on. :)
After seeing your version, I decided to try my hand at redoing it in such a way. Whadya think? I'm not used to modifying pictures in such a way, but you definitely piqued my interest in the possibilities for some of my other images that, for whatever reason, just don't do it for me. Perhaps, now, I can start making them more interesting in some way. Thank you very much for your inspiration. :)
Now THAT looks plumb evil! I like it a lot. I think my room mate will get a kick out of it, too. He's the guy in the picture. Awesome work on it. Now I'm jealous...wish I'd had the vision to create such an image. Thank you very much for sharing this. :)
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{K:209486} 11/3/2005
