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Happy Photographic New Year and a Mystery Image

by Pete on January 10, 2011 · 0 comments

Welcome to 2011 from Imagetree. It’s going to be a great year, more seminars, some changes to what we do and how we’re doing it. I’ll be doing more photography seminars this year as well as my Photoshop courses. Stay tuned.

This is a posting of new images including a digital painting I did using the new brush tools in Photoshop CS5. Amazing tools. I’ll let you work out which image from this post is the digital painting. Click any image to go large :) For those who know Photoshop this isn’t an applied filter it’s made using the new mixer and paint tools (and a Wacom, which is essential). I think Adobe are running out of things to put into Photoshop so maybe they’re trying to emulate some of the functionality of Corel Painter right inside Photoshop.

New Photoshop course dates will be are up on the website very soon now for those who’ve been asking me. I’m waiting to confirm some dates for my photography seminars so I can sort Photoshop courses out. I’ve been busy with other graphic design and website building tasks too. Again, stay tuned!

Lots of new images for you in this post all refined with Photoshop of course. A little bit of HDR, portrait manipulation, landscape and a grungy Winthrop Hall at UWA. Nothing straight from the camera. I’ve even squeezed in a macro shot.  BTW I’ve been lucky with some glorious cloudy skies to shoot – the first image below looked to me like sand thrown down by a cosmic hand (no, I’m not a believer in any cosmic deity but it’s a beautiful sky gifted by nature :)  Comments and queries welcome about any of my images. Enjoy. Pete.

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Shoot and retouch the ordinary for emotional impact

by Pete on October 19, 2010 · 2 comments

I posted recently about really looking at common things that are all around us. Here are a few examples of things I’ve tried to look at afresh over the last few days.

The greenery image is made from a picture I took of the leaves of a blackboy grass tree which is right outside my office window. I noticed how it looked late in the afternoon so I enhanced for emotion and didn’t concern myself with how it literally looked. I retouched for mood and colour. Click to enlarge.

I love shiraz. The label on the bottle I opened for dinner looked interesting side lit so I shot it with my desk lamp as light source, hand held 3200 ISO. Vignette, blurring and recoloured in Photoshop.

Way back in 1978 (yes, I said 1978!) I went to a photography seminar in Perth (Workshop 78—anyone remember those days?) and saw the legendary British photographer Sam Haskins (worth a Google if you don’t know him). Naively I asked him what sort of light he used for his pictures, as if it mattered. He tolerated my inane question and his reply “I use available light and by that I mean whatever is available”. I’ve never forgotten that. You don’t need fancy stuff to make pictures you just need to make pictures. Use the sun, a torch, a mirror, car headlights or $10,000 worth of studio flash. Judge the image not the tools used to make it.

Beautiful decay. Natural texture.

A couple of mornings ago I decided to halve a pear to dice and add to my breakfast cereal. By mid morning I noticed that the unused half (yes I’m lazy it was still on the chopping board) was starting to wither and I liked the texture and honesty. I put it outside for a couple of days to speed things up and photographed it tonight with a single off camera flash from behind with a small reflector fill. I like the Photoshop split tones on this one. The reduced colour range seems appropriate and I used a weathered background to push the ‘worn and wrinkled’ look I was trying to get.

Love these digital days—it’s so easy now to plan, shoot and retouch to get an image just the way you like. The only problem is that the world is filling up with amazing photos as more and more of us learn to shoot and use Photoshop. It’s getting harder to find an audience as we all click our way around the internet.

Still, I for one love this stuff. I’m blown away by how much fun it is to be a digital image maker.

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