Digital Imaging as Artwork

Selective Coloring

2011-12-05T11:59:00.001-05:00

As an art form, selective coloring is the act of taking pieces or subjects of a photo and converting them to black and white (or vice versa), so that only the selected object(s) of the photo remain in color.

This can be performed with a number of photo editors: Photoshop, GIMP, Pixelmator, etc.. Here is a good example of how to perform this in Photoshop.

If done properly, and done with an appropriate photo which lends itself to selective coloring, the result can be veery pleasing. Here is an example...

The fall colors are reflected off the mirror image in the pond, while the actual subject (grist mill and fall foliage) remains in black and white.

Care must be taken when defining the specific subject of the photo to be "etched" or traced along the edges for the result to be effective. For example, it is very easy to overlap the edges of a floral display when trying to highlight a single flower and care must be taken to outline just the edges of that single flower so that color does not bleed onto the others in the bouquet...unless this is the effect desired.

With practice and good subjects, this can be a very effective and pleasing form of art.

Photo Enhancing: Layering, Blending, etc.

2011-11-21T11:00:00.001-05:00

Whether using freeware of 3rd-party software, it is fairly easy to enhance a photo image these days by adding special effects through layers and blends. Take the following image:

This originated as a photo of 6 dice lying on tempered glass with a bright spot light shining upward from underneath. The result was okay, but didn't jump out at me and have that "wow!" affect.

So I brought it into Photoshop (GIMP and most other image editing software can be substituted for Photoshop), added a layer for texture to add the aging effect. Another layer was added for the scratch marks, and a 3rd for the shadows around the corners.

Blending these layers together can be done using various methods: multiply, screen, subtract...or simply by changing the opacity of each so that one bleeds into the layer below it, and so on to the bottom layer in the stack.

The resulting image is much more interesting, and was titled "Timeless Luck", both as a result of the subject: dice and "luck", and the aged effect from the layers and blending for a "timeless" effect.

There is an incredible amount of photo enhancing that can be done using these simple techniques, and it is left up to your imagination as to the final result.

2011-10-06T12:04:00.000-04:00

Working with texture has two aspects: the first is texture that is added to the composition using digital imaging software, and the second is an image that has texture as part of the content of the image itself.

Texture can add an interesting aspect to any image, giving it a third dimension of sorts. The following image had a grain added to it using a 3rd-party software editing program...

The grain in the above photo of a lighthouse (Ocracoke Is., NC) combined with the black-and-white conversion add a specific effect to the image that was otherwise somewhat washed out and just ho-hum.

The following photo of a hole in the beach, surrounded by "sand balls" creaked by a crab of some sort is intriguing in itself, and the close-up shot of the sand adds a nice texture to the image to give it a course yet interesting touch...

Visual texture can greatly enhance an image, weather digitally added or part of the original photo. Keep this in mind when snapping your next photo(s).

2011-10-03T16:29:00.001-04:00

I've reformatted my blog to something much more interesting. I don't know if this will be more appealing or not and only time will tell.

I've also discovered that my website (click on this blog entry to see the actual hot-link to my website) may display a hazard notice to all that venture there depending on the browser you use. I believe it is because I've embedded some harmless gadgets with javascript (which Google "Sites" does not support). Anyway, the site is truly safe and you can ignore any warning otherwise.

In the meantime, I've captured a butterfly before the fall and cold move in for the season, and used some editing magic to give it a slightly "steely" effect.

Collages

2011-06-11T13:26:00.000-04:00

Collages, montages, or whatever you want to call them, offer opportunities to bring something different to photography and digital imaging. I am not talking about the atypical collage which is simply a collection of other photos next to each other in various aspect ratios, but more along the lines of something like merging photos together in a seamless fashion.

The above image was created using Nodebox and some programming to merge hundreds of photo thumbnails together, and then overlay the resulting images into a single picture.

Another example involves using highly magnified images of paper currency from around the world and pasting them into a collage resembling a larger paper bill...

In the above, each section of a paper bill from around the globe was magnified 10x, and Photoshop was then used to place them together in a fashion to realize a much larger paper bill.

The types of collages that are atypical are limitless and only constrained by the imagination.

Back In Business

2011-06-09T14:03:00.003-04:00

Okay, after a 6 month hiatus, I have returned with a slew of new images, and an updated website.

My website is now more tailored for mobile devices while still offering a good sampling of my works.

I have been doing much more with multiple-exposure images, especially of various flowers and plants, which offer interesting results such as the following...

(click on image for larger view)

Basically, the camera is set to multiple-exposure mode, and I typically use 5-shots to make up the image. With each click of the shutter, I rotate the camera about 70 degrees about the center point of focus, in this case the center of the flowers. The resulting combined 5 images into one photo gives very interesting results.

Here's another rather interesting multiple-exposure of an iris...

I am never sure how the shot will come out until I have had a chance to download it into Aperture for some touch-ups, and possible use of Photomatix to bring out the strong colors and textures that are otherwise hidden from the photo.

Finally, there are new and novel ways to view my blog. Click on each to give each a test drive:

More to come in the following days...

Moving My Website

2011-01-18T09:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, I haven't been too active on this blog due to personal/family issues and I have had to put photography aside for a while.

In the meantime, my Sunrise Digital Website is being shutdown in favor of the free hosting provided by Google Sites. My new Website is not website is not quite as polished but provides basically the same content as that of the original.

I hope to be back up and active in this space in another month or so. In the meantime, I leave you with the following photo taken this past fall. It was a rainy day at the beach, gray and overcast. Having captured a small group of people off in the distance along the beach in the rain, I took the results and used Photoshop to overlay the image on itself several times flipping it both horizontally and vertically to get this interesting result...

This image, along with several others are now for sale as canvas murals. I find this medium very appealing (both the canvas and the mural aspects) albeit a bit costly. I have looked into producing my own canvas prints, but this would require around a $5K outlay for a very high-end printer that can print on canvas. Perhaps after I have won the lottery...

Digital Imaging and Lighting

2010-10-19T11:04:00.000-04:00

A book can be written on the subject, but the art of lighting can turn an otherwise how-hum photo into a piece of artwork. There are different types of lighting, from natural to artificial, direct vs. indirect, etc., each of which deserves it's own subject.

For now, I am focusing on artificial lighting and how it can provide a dramatic effect (and will affect) to your subject. Here is a good in which artificial light was used to create a glowing effect with a reflection off glass...

In this shot, it took me about an hour to set-up and experiment with different lighting to get just the right results. I used a smooth glass surface to place the object on, and then aimed a spot light from the floor up through the glass surface which provided the glow of the subject and it's reflection off the glass surface.

Plan to spend a good deal of time setting up the perfect environment for the shot, and don't be afraid to experiment. This image was one of about twenty photos I took before I got just the right balance of light, glow and reflection.

Factors to consider include: interior lighting (dark vs. light), light source and angle, camera position relative to the subject (and in this case, the glass surface), distance of the camera to the subject, etc.. Then there are the camera settings: desired ISO, aperture and shutter speed.

WHile not every shot will be a "keeper", taking the time and making fine adjustments to get the lighting just right can make all of the difference when it comes to photography and digital artwork.

Making the most of HDR

2010-08-19T09:25:00.000-04:00

HDR, or High Definition Range, is a topic I have previously covered. True perfectionists will claim that HDR is only a result of combining multiple aperture-bracketed or exposure-bracketed images, and that using tone mapping or exposure HDR mapping technologies against a single does not qualify as true HDR.

Here is a good example of a true HDR image created from 5 aperture-bracketed images....

Caught in shade with a bright sunny background, the HDR software was able to capture the best of both by combining the lights of the shadows with the darker images of the bright background.

But I argue the case for both instances: sourced from multiple images and from only a single image. The case for multiple based images goes without saying, since that was what the technology, for the most part, was created for. The above image is a perfect example of the effectiveness of this technology with multiple images.

But I also have found most helpful the case in which a photo has been taken in deep shape, or a mix of shade and sunlight. Using software such as Photoshop's HDR interface, Photomatix or HDRTist, I have been able to bring out the color and lighting of otherwise drab or challenging single photos...

Above is an otherwise dark photo in which the train tracks are dull and the leaves on the trees very drab.

By applying the same HDR software to the above single image photo, I can easily enhance this photo...

Note the enhanced texture and brighter colors in the above photo after applying the HDR tone-mapping process over that of the original photo. This is a good example of a shot taken in a very shady area in which HDR technology has helped "bring it to light".

Could I have done a better job of taking the original photo with better lighting settings on my camera? Probably, but in this case I was rushed for time and had to take a quick snap-shot without having the time to set the appropriate camera settings to get a higher quality original image. HDR came to the rescue.

So while the purest in me agrees that multiple images make for a "true" HDR image, I also find that using the technology on single images that are either in shadow or a combination of deep shadow and high brightness can quickly save an otherwise troubled single photograph.

Photos That Tell a Story

2010-07-30T10:32:00.001-04:00

My primary focus is on landscapes, macro, and "object" oriented photography. I am not a portrait photographer per se. But I also feel that photos that tell a story or peak the viewer's interest are very compelling, more pleasing and more "sale-able" than those of basic landscapes and objects.

Take the following photo as an example...

Dog Luggage

The above shows two people on the beach, carrying their dogs in luggage-like cases which provide flotation while the dogs are swimming. Note the woman walking by, turning her head in a double-take. You can almost read her mind, "What the...?".

It is a good photo, which makes the viewer think. It's amusing to the point of being funny. And in it's own way it tells a story. Walking the dog takes on a new meaning.

This next photo provides another example...

Beached Tug

The image above is interesting in that it doesn't specifically tell a story, but rather asks the viewer about the story: how did this boat get beached, what is it's history, who owns it and why did he leave it abandoned, etc.?

Photos should not only be interesting, but make the viewer think about the subject: how was that photo taken>? What a special effect, how was it done? Is there a "mood" to the image (loneliness, hope/hopelessness, joy, etc.) and what is the overall effect of the image? Does it make the viewer ponder it like a piece of artwork? If so, then you have captured a good image. If not, then it is just a flat photo and doesn't provoke any thought or emotions from the viewer.

When setting up for your next photo shoot, think about these concepts rather than just shooting away randomly.

Library Management with Aperture

2010-06-05T09:50:00.001-04:00

I've discussed the management of photo libraries with Aperture before, but didn't cover the topic of where photos should reside: in Aperture or external as "referenced" files.

With Aperture version 3.0.3, the program is more interactive regardless of the library size. The best general rule is: if you have the hard drive space, keep your photos directly in Aperture; if you are constrained for hard drive space then keep the photos outside Aperture as referenced files, but in a folder structure that replicates that of Aperture.

One key reason for keeping photos inside Aperture is that should you need to recover your system from Time Machine, your Aperture library will be restored as well as any referenced photos. But the linkage between the referenced photos and Aperture is lost and it is necessary to go into Aperture and locate all of your referenced files manually.

The manual process to locate your referenced files can be very time consuming, especially for very large photo libraries. If you must store your photos outside Aperture then it is best to keep them in the same structure as you have them inside your Aperture library as referenced photos.

The best approach to maintaining external photos as referenced files is:

1- First load you photos into Aperture and put them in the project/folder/album where you want each to reside.

2- Select the new photos just loaded and use the "Relocate Photos" to store them as referenced files in the same folder structure in which you have them referenced as in Aperture.

Step #2 will move them out of the Aperture library and store them in an external location of your choosing: make sure to save them in the project/folder/album structure that you have them stored in Aperture. In this way, if you do have to recover your system using Time Machine, then locating them to re-assign the linkage is a much simpler process since they are all together in their project/folder/album order vs. having to hunt-and-peck to locate each photo or photo group which would take significantly more time and effort.

Net: if you have the hard drive space, keep your photos in Aperture. If you have to store them outside Aperture, load them in first and then "relocate" them in the manner in which they are stored in Aperture.

Now lets talk about back-up. Sure, you have your photos backed up on Time Machine. But backups are not infallible. Get an external storage device that preferably supports RAID 1 such that if the storage device fails, your files will still be recoverable since they are essentially duplicated on the storage device.

Also consider yet another, more basic external storage drive to which you will also back up your photos and entire Aperture library which you store offsite. This backup covers you in the event your home or business burns to the ground. The backup can be made monthly, and you can store the drive at a family member's home.

Net: it's always better safe than sorry. Losing countless photos, many with great memories is a very painful experience that can be avoided with these simple steps.

The Influence of Photoshop CS5 to Digital Imaging

2010-05-09T10:01:00.000-04:00

With the introduction of Photoshop CS5, Adobe has brought to the table a number of enhancements that are true game changers for the photographer. Some of these are for the better, while others are for the worse based on your perspective. This all part of Adobe's new "Just Do It" (JDI) architectural changes that make major altering effects much simpler to use.

Without going into a tedium list of enhancements, I'll focus on just a just a few that are significant:

- Content-Aware Fill

Heal any selection using the new Content-Aware Fill option, which sources multiple points outside the selection and adds a bit of surface mapping as well.
Simply stated, the ability to touch up a photo by removing unwanted artifacts has become significantly easier and significantly improved. Adobe accomplishes this by introducing much greater sampling of surrounding areas and providing much better eradication based on this sampling.

- HDR Toning

Those familiar with Photomatix will recognize this enhancement. In effect, the ability to enhance photos (or any graphic image) using tone mapping is now a trivial matter. HDR (single image or multiple image) altered images will become mainstream, perhaps to excess.

- Puppet Warp

In effect, an image can much more easily be altered by defining one or more points within the image and using them as points for transformation...again, now a trivial task.

- Paint Brush Mixer

This has the same effect as brushing a paint brush across a palette of colors, but in this implementation the palette is a graphic image.

- Performance

The 64-bit version of Photoshop start-up is significantly faster and the processing of much larger images is much speedier given a higher end PC or MAC (e.g. with multi-core processors, 8GBs memory). I include this since it can take a image altering process that previously took (many) minutes down to seconds.

You can find out much more about these enhancements all over the Internet by simply googling "photoshop cs5 enhancements", including how-to videos.

My focus, here, is to point out that these changes are major game changers, For better or for worse, amateur-to-professional photographers now have a host of easy-to-use tools that can dramatically alter an image.

From the perspective of the professional photographer focused on the "photo" rather than the "altered effects", this is not necessarily a good thing. From the perspective of the individual focused on altered results, this is a boon.

In other words, I believe we will begin to see a barrage of altered photos that, for better or for worse, will have major artifacts removed and simple-to-wild modifications that can perhaps be called "artwork" yet which bend the definition of creativity due to their simplicity of altering implementation.

Photography Lesson Learned - Traveling

2010-04-09T16:29:00.000-04:00

I recently took a month getaway to a nice warm island in the Caribbean and made a conscious decision to not lug my high-end camera and host of lenses along with me for this trip. Instead, I chose my 10 mega-pixel Canon G9 PowerShot, which takes very good photos.

I opted to avoid the full compliment of photo equipment for several reasons:

1- Airport Security and Travel

All of my equipment comes in at around 30+ pounds, which can be cumbersome when flying, going through airports and especially when dealing with airport security. And theft is always a concern.

2- Subject Matter

While I enjoyed the wonderful experience of my travels to this small island, I have made many trips before and have already taken hundreds of photos. The island is beautiful, but relatively small and does not offer too much in the way of new subject matter beyond sandy beaches and near-perfect sunsets.

So having brought me point-and-shoot camera, I managed to take over 500 photos. Upon returning home and having started to process them with Aperture, I noticed to my dismay a smudge in the lower left of the lens. Why not catastrophic, it is negligible in many shots, while quite noticeable in others. I can touch-up those photos that really matter, while cropping out the smudge in others.

The lesson I learned from this experience? Check your equipment, regardless of small or large, before leaving home. And check it at least a couple of weeks before a trip in case some piece needs to be professionally repaired.

Revisiting Photos

2010-02-25T09:37:00.003-05:00

With ever-growing high resolution photo images, especially those in the 10 mega-pixel or greater range, it is an easy and fun task to revisit photos to see which ones can be re-worked or re-invented through cropping.

A high resolution image can easily be cropped and still maintain a high quality to the cropped image. And by cropping, what I have started to do is effectively zoom in on a particular segment of the image that brings out a new image of sorts, that otherwise was lost in the details of the larger image. The results can be very effective, and generate a new image that can be almost artistic in nature.

Take the following image of a dieffenbachia...

By cropping and altering the color range of this image, I was able to create the following new image...

When looking at the two images, it is easy to see the similarity and relationship. But when looking at the second image by itself, it takes on a completely new perspective, with greater depth, texture and color.

Using this approach provides a nice and great way to create new images from old, and generate potential new art work from otherwise very basic photographs.

Aperture 3 - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Cont)

2010-02-18T13:48:00.002-05:00

Update: Apple has just released (02/24/10) an update to Aperture (3.0.1, 32MBs), which addresses all of the issues reported here and by other users on their forum.

So I experienced the following problems with the new version of Aperture:

1- When I turned on "Faces" to automatically recognize faces, the process ran forever with no end in sight.
2- After disabling faces from the Preference window, I then found that "Processing..." was displaying at the bottom of the window. When I displayed the Activity window, it said it had 0 of 1089 images to process, and the number never incremented off zero. This "processing" continued, with heavy I/O, until Aperture ate up all of the swap space and I was forced to either kill Aperture and re-boot, or simply re-boot since Aperture was essentially hung with the rest of the OS.

So I started reading through the very lengthy Aperture forum on the Apple website regarding these issues, and tried various suggestions to resolve the problems I encountered along with many others.

Here is the one suggestion that worked for me:

1- Hold "Shift" key when starting AP3 to force AP to not generate previews.

2- In Preferences > Previews, uncheck "New projects automatically generate new previews", uncheck "Use embedded JPEG from camera whenever possible", and change "Share previews with i'Life and i'Work" to never.

3- Select from the inspector view "Library" > "Projects" so that all projects are displayed.

4- From the menubar, select "Photos" > "Delete Preview" . This will take several minutes depending on the size of your library, as it deletes all the previews in your library of photos.

5- turn off previews from being generated at all by doing the following:

In the Library inspector, select all the projects, then choose Maintain Previews For Projects from the Library Action pop-up menu (with a gear icon), so there is no checkmark next to it. And just to ensure this takes for all projects, select each project individually and ensure that "Maintain Previews For Projects" is unchecked.

6- Shutdown AP3 and start AP3 normally.

"Processing..." displays at the bottom as before, but when bringing up the Activity window, the image count is actually incrementing from 1 to the number of images to be "processed", in my case 9060 images. It appears to be processing one image every 2-3 seconds, on average. This takes a couple of hours, but it doesn't run out of memory/swap space while allowing me to interact with AP3 normally with good response time.

And if I do need previews in the future, I can always recreate them as needed. I suspect the Preview files/db was corrupt...just a guess.

I'll try turning faces back on at some later date when I have little else to do :o)

For now, AP3 is working as expected after wasting 2 days trying and finally succeeding to fix it. I highly suspect Apple will come out with some sort of major update to address the many issues in the coming days/weeks.

Aperture 3 - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

2010-02-17T10:57:00.002-05:00

Update: Apple has just released (02/24/10) an update to Aperture (3.0.1, 32MBs), which addresses all of the issues reported here and by other users on their forum.

I recently purchased the upgrade for Apple's Aperture version 3, a major upgrade to the library management and photo editing software for professional and amateur photographers.

The good: the installation was fairly straight forward and went very smoothly.
The good: this new version sports major feature enhancements ... over 300 to be exact, that brings improved photo enhancing capabilities, iPhoto auto-import (yes, I no longer have to manage two separate photo libraries!!), face and place recognition, etc..

The bad: Once installed, the first time Aperture is invoked it must convert the library to the new format. For me on a dual core iMac running 32-bit, this took 1 hour and 40 minutes. It converts formats for projects, thumbnails (the longest process), images and other assorted data before actually presenting the Aperture user interface.

The ugly: I started to use the face recognition feature, in which it scans all of the photos and identifies those with faces. After 20 minutes or so, my iMac seemed to hang when in fact the Aperture process had consumed all I/O for my iMac and I could not interact with it or any other program. After clicking on the "Aperture" menubar command, and waitng minutes for the pull-down to appear (I was very patient!), I was able to select "Quit" and after another 5 minutes Aperture actually quit and normal processing returned.

The Apple forum on Aperture 3 is full of user complaints about Aperture consuming all resources, and hanging on installation if adequate hard drive free space is not available. I had plenty of free space available on my 1TB hard drive so that was not an issue. But it appears that with over 30,000 photos in my library, Apertures key files (i.e. thumbnails, etc.) have become huge in size. And "Faces" adds new thumbnails for each face identified.

And unfortunately, it appears that the face recognition technology used by Aperture is the same, or perhaps worse, than that in iPhoto. It identified many photos as having faces which in fact had no face. And once an individual's face is tagged with a name, it is still a very manual process to add each photo of that contains a face of that person. While face recognition is a fairly complex process, it should still be able to automatically make logically smart guesses for exact or close matches without my having to confirm each and every one of them.

Lastly, Aperture seems to hang in a never ending I/O loop processing images and/or faces. The Apple forum is full of posts from users experiencing this problem.

My recommendations:

DON'T INSTALL APERTURE 3 UNTIL APPLE HAS RELEASED A MAJOR FIX FOR THE PERFORMANCE ISSUES. But if you must install it, then....

1- Plan on at least 2 hours for the Aperture conversion to complete for very large photo libraries (i.e. 20,000+ photos).
2- Don't use "Faces" until a major update to Aperture 3 is provided by Apple to address this and other performance issues.
3- Postpone importing iPhoto until a major update is provided by Apple since this could also lead to serious performance issues if your iPhoto library 1) is large; and 2) has faces identified via i"Life '09.

Composition - Back to Basics

2010-01-13T17:36:00.002-05:00

I recently took a photo-op journey to a beautiful southern city in which I took over 1300 photos. After returning home to process this wealth of images, I was somewhat disappointed at the lack of quality exhibited by many of the shots.

What was wrong? I didn't take the necessary time and effort to properly compose each and every photo. Those that I did take the time to compose came out fairly well.

Things that are critical to consider for a great photo vs. a so-so or bad photo include:

Lighting: where is the sun in respect to your subject, and is it the lighting you are looking for. Bright, sunny days may seem ideal for outdoor photos, but keep in mind that the sun casts shadows and is very bright when in the background. Partial to complete overcast days may provide a better lighting environment for the particular shot you are trying to capture. And when the sun is out, try to keep it to your back, behind the scene, rather than in the foreground to eliminate overexposed shots or photo washout...unless, of course, the sun is playing a specific role in the shot you are taking (e.g. sun shine through tall grasses).

Location and proximity: are you in the best position for the subject, centered vs. off-center, too much subject (zoomed out) or too close, etc.? With the higher mega-pixels available in todays cameras, it is probably better to take a photo of too much rather than risk capturing an image that doesn't include the entire subject. You can always crop a n image that has too much subject area, but you can't easily go back and re-take a shot in which you didn't quite get everything in that you had planned to. Consider the angle from which you are shooting (straight on vs. from the side or up/down). Depending on the "effect" you wish to capture, this is very important. You may have to relocate to a different spot entirely to get just the right shot you want.

The subject: if taking photos of people, do you need a particular pose? Consider taking many (hundreds) of shots in a freeform fashion as the subject(s) move around, stop and talk, etc.. If you need a particular pose, check the lighting and exposure before position the people for the particular shot. See #1 and #2 above.

The lens: picking the right lens for the shot is critical since not all lens are equal, and the results can vary in a dramatic. If you have the time and opportunity, try using different lens for the same subject / shot. You may very well find that the "keeper" is from a lens you expected less from than what you actually got.

RAW vs. JPG file formats: RAW is a good, safe file format to shoot in but has some drawbacks. Consider what the photos are to be used for, and how you plan to process them. While RAW file format offers greater flexibility in photo editing, it generates much larger files which consume more space on your photo memory card and can slow down the camera when taking multiple shots: 6 shots per second with JPG may only be 3 or 4 shots per second when shooting in RAW format. And if the software you are planning to use doesn't handle RAW file format, you'll end up having to convert the images to the format the software can handle.

Camera settings: double and triple-check your camera settings: exposure, aperture and speed. With more expensive cameras it is very easy to take bad pictures due to the wrong setting for the particular shot being taken. Also give some thought to how you want the shot to come out, which gets back to #1, composition.

Handheld or tripod: if you can, use a tripod for more challenging photos: low light, motion (the subject) for certain effects, telephoto, etc.. While the newer cameras have image stabilization built in to either the lens or the camera body itself, you can not rely on this for the perfect shot. Sometimes it is simply better to put the camera on a tripod or even a monopod to offer the stability needed for special situations.

Taking the precautions listed above into consideration when going on a photo op. can make the difference between ho-hum images and genuine keepers that you can work much better with and get much better results from.

Panoramas

2009-11-28T10:25:00.003-05:00

It seems relatively simple to create a decent panorama. But in fact, achieving a quality panorama can be all but simple.

Here is an example of a poorly taken panorama, in which the exposure changes from stitched frame to frame. The dark lines between images are a good example of panoramas gone wrong...

First, you must decide how much detail is desired. Say you are at an event at which there are people lounging around a pool. In this case, you want to set your camera to not zoom out. You want to capture both height and width as a component of your panorama. On the other hand, if you are at the grand canyon, a very nice panorama can be created by setting your camera to full zoom so that you are capturing all of the detail in the distance, albeit a narrow band or height.

While a tripod is not absolutely required, it will ensure the camera is both stable and taking photos along the same axis such as the horizon. One image in a series of side-by-side photos which is off kilter can cause havoc to the software used to stitch the photos all together.

Next come the camera settings. The key is to basically get the same exposure from photo to photo regardless of the background or setting for each in order to provide a seamless transition from one photo to the next. Using the "automatic" setting on your camera will result in some images coming out over exposed and/or vice versa. This, in turn, will disrupt your panorama and the transitions will appear in the final results even if very minor. It is best to set your camera to manual mode, then find the most commonly lighted area, hold down the camera's image capture button half way and use your camera's aperture auto lock feature to hold the specific focal point and exposure settings. If you don't know how to do this, refer to your camera's manual.

Other camera settings to disable include: Manual Focus Assist, Image Stabilization, Autofocus Assist Beam, Red Eye Detection and Auto ISO Shift. Each of these can alter one or more photos such that there is a visual difference from all of the other photos which will affect the desired smooth transition from photo to photo.

Only now are you ready to begin taking your side-by-side photos. Make sure that each photo overlaps the previous one by at least 25% to 30% so that the photo- stitching software can easily identify the overlapping regions.

Okay, you now have a series of side-by-side photos that need to be stitched together. Many newer cameras provide their own photo stitching software for which I can not speak to. But there are some freeware and 3rd-party solutions that do very good job at proper matching and stitching.

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements offer a "Photomerge" feature which is good but has some deficiencies under certain circumstances. Downsizing the image after it is stitched with Photomerge can result in small hairline cracks appearing between each image. And Photomerge can sometimes improperly align your photos based on it's algorithms, such as top-to-bottom rather than side-by-side.

Gigapan Systems previously offered their software free (it was still in beta), and it does an excellent job having been based on the software used to stitch the thousands of photos taken by the Mars rover. But it makes assumptions which can affect your results, such as the movement of people and objects within a particular image of the larger panorama, and remove pieces and parts of objects or subjects based on their persistence across two or more overlapping photos. And unless you now purchase a Gigapan System device, access to this now proprietary software is unavailable. And their software is really intended for huge panoramas made up of hundreds of photos.

Hugin is an open-source based solution (i.e. free). It's deficiency is reliance on you to manually identify the overlapping points between photos before it will attempt to stitch them together. This can be somewhat cumbersome and some consuming for panoramas made up of many photos.

Doubletake is a favorite of mine. While being a 3rd-party solution, it has a very simple interface and is relatively easy to use interface. And it produces very good results. One very nice feature lies in it's overlapping adjuster or top-and-bottom sliders which allow you to adjust the alignment of two photos if their exposure or blend is not perfect.

To sum this up, a good panorama first depends on the proper photo taking (i.e. camera settings) and overlapping of photos. Then it is up to you to select the best software to stitch the photos together in an effect and easy manner.

Black and White vs. Color Images

2009-10-31T13:56:00.001-04:00

I am just beginning to truly appreciate black and white images. When I view other's I truly appreciate the lack of color, but have never considered anything but color myself until now.

I feel there is a place and time for color or black and white, and find that black and white sets a different mood to that of color images. I am starting to realize that the subject can easily dictate whether to create a color image vs. a black and white image.

Take the following color image, which is very nice in context to the background fall foliage. The image conveys a calming effect.

But when converted to black and white, the image takes on a totally different atmosphere: one of age, history and a rustic flair.

Is one image better than the other? Not necessarily. I believe it is all in what the photographer is trying to convey from the results.

One other word: take the shot in black and white or convert it after the fact with software? I prefer the later since it gives me the option of doing both black and white as well as color shot and then comparing the results.

So from now on I am definitely doing more with black and white...depending on the subject.

The Ultimate Mosaic Maker?

2009-10-11T13:29:00.003-04:00

For those of you interested in mosaics made up from hundreds if not thousands of other photos, you have to watch this video...

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

The beauty of this solution is not only the context of drawing to get the result, but more so the image retrieval based on the context of the subject. This is a very interesting approach and offers a much more relevant finished mosaic.

I can only imagine, though, that there is a significant amount of processing required to get the right hue, color and subject match-ups for the particular object.

I downloaded and tried running the binary code to no avail, only to run into Microsoft-specific missing DLL errors. Considering that this was a research project done in China could easily explain the runtime error due to a variant of Microsoft Windows for China.

Regardless, the approach is fascinating and it would be great to get a version of this that is open source and platform independent.

Managing Large Photo Libraries

2009-10-11T13:05:00.003-04:00

This has been a hot topic for many people, and there are different solutions depending on the photographer's needs and available photo library management software.

I have personally struggled to maintain two libraries: iPhoto for personal pictures, and Aperture for photos I want to enhance. I have since found this line to blur, such that each overlaps the other.

So I now load all of my snapshots into Aperture. But as my Aperture library started to grow over 45GBs and took ever-longer to open and close, I became concerned about the possibility of the library getting corrupted as well as overall performance. I have already seen photo corruption in iPhoto, with transient pointers (iPhoto library's XML) pointing to perfect thumbnails but the original photo no where to be found.

And when it takes 10 to 20 seconds for Aperture to write out the associated data store for previews, my attention span quickly gets lost waiting for this to complete.

There are 3 distinct options for photo storage typically available to most professional photo library management systems:

Ignore potential issues and keep all images in the (single) library.
Keep the source images on the locally hard drive or other storage media and reference them from the library management system,
Maintain separate copies of the library management system, each copy designated for a particular set or group of photos.

Most consider option 3 to be the worst scenario from a usability perspective, since it is necessary to close one library to access images stored in another.

While option 1 seems ideal, I've already discussed some of the issues as the library grows beyond effective usability.

So I have settled on option #2, keeping recently taken photos regardless of the subject on the local hard drive and no importing them directly into Aperture. Alterations to these images that I make in Aperture (i.e. the "version" related information) remains in Aperture. So in a worse case scenario, should I lose the Aperture library I still have the original photos. Plus I can easily archive them to another media if I so desire at a later point in time.

And Aperture will allow me to move these external source photos around on my hard drive, or simply auto-import them directly into the Aperture library at a future point in time if so desired. I feel this gives me the most flexibility and ease of use.

Unfortunately, I am still dealing with two different management solutions: iPhoto and Aperture. So I tend to export or copy those personal images that I have touched up from Aperture into iPhoto.

iPhoto does have the face recognition which is convenient and tough to beat. Google Picasa's face recognition doesn't seem as effective as that of iPhoto. So I'll keep iPhoto around for a while and deal with the overlap for now.

Multiple Exposures

2009-10-03T13:36:00.004-04:00

With a recently new camera I acquired I can now take multiple exposures to make up a single frame. And better yet, I can specify how many exposures, up to a maximum of ten, that I want to include in the single framed shot.

This offers some very interesting and creative opportunities. Unlike blurred time-lapsed photos, these multi-exposed images are each individually taken and overlaid upon each other for a compiled final image. Depending on the subject and movement, a blurring effect can be obtained. But in many other cases it is very easy to simply capture a subject from different angles within a short period, or burst, of time as an overlay of one on top of the other.

The following image offers a prime example of this scenario, in which 5 separate shots, or exposures, were taken within a 10 second period as I moved around a tree. Each of the 5 images were overlaid to create a single image by the camera rather than by software...

From the above it is possible to see the leaves of the tree stamped against the sky, and the blue sky bracketed by images of leaves...a very pleasing effect that almost appears as though the image were painted.

Similar experiments with multiple exposure images have produced similar effects while others (i.e. of a rotating ceiling fan) capture more of a blurred effect due to the fast-moving flan blades.

And five exposures-per-frame seems to be a magic number for me that gives me the results I am looking for. Any fewer and the effect is much more limited, while adding more simply would be overkill.

Now the challenge is to see how I can use this technique on a more consistent basis using more interesting subjects.

Creating a Mosaic of a Panorama

2009-09-26T15:40:00.006-04:00

I have started playing with combining two different areas of digital art that I most enjoy: panoramas and mosaics. In the example below, I took a panorama that I stitched together from 7 side-by-side overlapping images.

I then took the resulting very wide and narrow panorama image and fed it into a program to generate a mosaic. In this case, the mosaic consists of over 80,000 images from Flickr. The resulting 2.6GB (giga-pixel mosaic panorama was uploaded to Gigapan.org for viewing by the public. I have also posted it in my Sunrise Digital Artworks website.

Use the controls to zoom in-and-out-around, or simply click on the snapshots underneath the panorama to go to a particular detailed portion of the mosaic in which you can see the individual images making up the mosaic, and at the same time lose the perspective of the original panorama image.

It took approximately 8 hours to process this from end-to-end, starting with stitching the 7 original overlapping images together. Fun!!! Check out my Sunrise Digital Artworks website for more examples.

2009-09-26T15:40:00.001-04:00

The Workflow of Digital Imaging

2009-09-26T14:38:00.002-04:00

I discussed my workflow in one of my earlier blog posts, but now have a different perspective on workflow as it pertains to digital imaging in support of art.

From a business perspective, workflow is 25% photo work and 75% marketing. Well, I am spending 100% on the work side right now, and of this 100% it breaks down as follows:

20% venue setup and photography
10% image uploads
40% image review and touch-up
30% post-image processing

So let's look at the above break-out and how it plays out for me.

Venue set-up involves picking a subject, location and setting. Timing can be a key factor from the perspective of lighting (sun). This also involves travel to-and-from the particular venue. Then comes the actual photography, using different cameras and lenses to capture the precise subject of interest.

With ever-increasing mega-pixel cameras one of the side effects is that the resulting very-large photos can take quite a bit of time to actually load into the specific software on the computer. With a large number of photos in RAW format, this can take upwards of an hour or more.

Once the images have been uploaded, each has to be reviewed and categorized for further processing. I make two or three passes, the first of which is to look for images that simply aren't worth keeping and I trash them. On the second pass I rate the quality of the image by assigning a rating from 1 (poor) to 5 (fantastic). I then go through the 5's and start touching them up. This touch-up can be very time consuming and involves adjusting about 15 different settings (color, contrast, definition, etc.). I make a final pass to determine if I want to add any special effects (soften/sharpen, glow, sepia, black-and-white/silver, etc.).

But the most time consuming part comes into play once I've fine-tuned the best of the images, and decide on how I want to use them: mosaics, collages, etc.. This final step can take days to weeks depending on the level of detail and complexity of the project. For example, a collage of 30 images can take days or weeks to lay out depending on the subject and the layout parameters. These are done at very high definition using postage-sized images and require many tweaks to get the size, placement, coloring and placement just right.

To sum this up, the photo taking is probably the easy part, and it is what I do with the photos afterwards that involves most of the work. Establishing a good workflow end-to-end process can ease the burden of time consuming tasks such as uploading photos while touching-up others. This overlapping of tasks can more than half the amount of time spent on any particular project.

Easy Image Enhancements

2009-09-16T12:10:00.006-04:00

Sometimes it is far easier to reuse what someone else has already created to enhance an otherwise okay image. While there are many 3rd-party imaging enhancing plug-ins available for Adobe's Photoshop and Apple's Aperture, I have found a wealth of free resources on the Web specifically for Adobe's Photoshop.

These enhancing tools come in the form of Photoshop "actions". Here is a pointer to 50 such free actions to change the look and feel of almost any photo. These actions work similar to built-in filters, but provide specific enhancing features that are applied to a specific image. Examples of these action adjustments include changes to the colors, saturation and other typical photograph tweaks. Others add a grainy-ness, old film look, and other special effects that can be done within Photoshop if you know the correct steps to take, and have instead been neatly packaged as push-button actions.

Here are the before (color image) and after results (brown image) of an action which adds a "brown-bag" effect via a simple push-button...

As mentioned, there are many 3rd-party plug-ins for various photo editors that provide similar effects, but none are free. These Photoshop "actions" offer the benefits of many of these plug-ins at no cost. It is important, though, to read any license that may be attached to the action, since some do not allow for commercial use.

The question is: is the use of such actions considered art? While there is little creativity in clicking on an action button to make a major or subtle transformation, the result is in the eye of the beholder.

(Psuedo) Framed vs. Unframed Artwork

2009-09-12T11:11:00.008-04:00

I have been thinking about the pseudo frame many photographers put around their artwork, typically intended for a real frame or poster. This pseudo frame simply consists of a background color for the photo, a narrow line denoting a border around the artwork, and the name of the art piece and photographers / artists name.

I imagine there is a more technical term for this type of frame, which for purposes of appearance as well as information. This pseudo frame can add to the art piece, regardless of the medium. For example, I create many collages consisting of objects that have something in common. But there is no "statement" regarding the art piece or by whom it was created.

Some factors need to be considered before jumping into this:

what size border do I add?

which color best maps to the art piece as a whole without taking the viewer's eye away from the artwork?
How thick should the border line making up the pseudo frame be, and in what color?
Do I include the name of the piece and my name inside or outside the border line?

As an example, I offer the before and after results of a pseudo frame (ignore the size difference between the two)...

It seems to me that the latter is more eye appealing, offers more to the viewer and therefore adds value to the artwork. Any thoughts on this...??

Media for Digital Artwork

2009-09-07T12:05:00.004-04:00

I have found recently that simply posting digital images here and there is not necessarily enough to capture the attention of the viewer. Most blogs and other photo sites do just that. While visually pleasing, this approach is best suited for a small collection of photos.

But when dealing with a large collection of images, especially those that are somehow related, an animated view which takes you through the images one at a time for a second or two is more appropriate.

Various solutions provide animated images in this fashion. On my Apple iMac, I can use iMovie to create a video of single images transitioning from one to another. Google's Picasa also offers a similar feature.

Here is a simple example of a movie made up of 14 back-to-back images using iMovie...

A 3rd-party suite of solutions from Aquafadas has my interest since they offer what appears to be very rich video experiences for the viewer above simple image-to-image transitions. Specifically, their BannerZest and PulpMotion products appear to offer theme based videos which can easily be customized to meet one's needs and transform an otherwise static image into a very pleasing viewing experience.

PulpMotion offers the basic and advanced features, and I am not sure what the advanced version offers over the basic version. I plan to download the demo versions of both and give them a test drive.

Net: there are better ways to display a collection of images than simply dumping them onto a website in single-image fashion. Turning them into an animated video offers the viewer a much more pleasing experience...I believe.

Wired Magazine 10 Photography Pet Peeves

2009-08-31T08:12:00.002-04:00

Wired magazine published their 10 top peeves related to photography, and while some people tend to over-use many of these, I argue that much in this list offers photographers a level of creativity that brings the "art" to photography and imaging.

Whether it is High Dynamic Range (HDR), arms-length self portrait, mega-pixels or wide-angle vertical shots, each offers a different and sometimes unique perspective on an otherwise not-too-impressive photo.

As I have described in previous posts, HDR can add dynamic ranges to an image to bring out the highlights. And when used to the extreme, a photo can even be transformed into an image as though it were painted. Perhaps this isn't "pure" photography but it does offer a great deal of latitude from the perspective of an artist.

Self-portraits can be fun, and doing so in various means only adds to the creativity of the resulting image.

Maxing out on mega-pixels offers the photographer the opportunity to not be on top of the subject, and crop out what might otherwise detract from a so-so photo to transform it into something special. Sharp and crisp images result, and photographs can always add noise and grain back into the image if that is what is desired.

Wide-angle vertical shots: nothing wrong with this if it isn't over used.

I like Wired magazine and their views. But sometimes the "old" is still as great as when it was first used eons ago in Wired's frame of time. Ansel Adam's still landscape shots are still classics, and taking similar shots today don't detract from the method or subject. Perhaps it's the proliferation of digital cameras in almost every cell phone that and the near ubiquity of photography as a media that has Wired peeved. Who knows, and more importantly, who cares?

Net: if it works for you and you like the result then keep doing it. As I have said before, art is in the eye of the beholder and this is also very true of photography.

Out of Focus Effects as Artwork

2009-08-28T09:34:00.006-04:00

I am playing around with timed exposures and blurring to produce very interesting images from the perspective of art. Here's an example...

What makes this work are a few key items: an interesting and colorful subject, low lighting, long exposure of anywhere from 1 to 2 seconds and many test shots.

While it sounds simple, the resulting images can be washed out if there is too much light. This is why low light is perfect since I am keeping the aperture open for a long time.

The final key: move the camera around the subject while the aperture is open. This provides the blurring effect. I try to move the camera just a little, and then more with subsequent photos to get just the right result I am looking for given the particular subject. Moving toward or around the subject can also add interesting "swirl" effects.

The result can be somewhat abstract given too much blurring and swirling. If the there is too little, or too much light wash-out, then I use Photoshop to merge 2 or more images with opacity set to about 70% to merge the multiple exposures into one to get the results I am looking for. Here's an example of 3 lighter images blended together with Photoshop into a single image...

I call this imaging effect "blurl", a combination of blur and swirl. See more of my blurl works at my blurl sales site.

HDR Images

2009-08-26T16:27:00.004-04:00

HDR, or high dynamic range, based images are generated computationally when mapping various tonal settings to 3 images of the same scene, each taken at a different exposure using exposure bracketing.

For example, with exposure bracketing 3 images are taken on the camera: one at -n exposure, the second picture at the "0" or perfect exposure, and the third at the +n exposure. Typically "n" is +/- 2 while some cameras support up to an offset of 3. When these three images are merged with software, the straight forward approach is to use the best highs of the over-exposed image mixed with the best lows of the under-exposed image and averaged with the properly exposed image...to provide a better-than-optimum resulting image.

But the real fun comes into play when using a slew of other software adjustments to create a tone-mapped image. The results can look surrealistic, and almost as though they are painted. With HDR and tone mapping the sky is the limit, so to speak, on the amount of artistic creativity that can result from this tweaking of 3 different exposed images of the same scene.

Here is an example of a calm park setting which was taken with the camera set using exposure bracketing of +/- 2. The HDR tone mapping settings were tweaked to make the resulting image look almost surrealistic...

Numerous software solutions are available to create HDR images. A great list is available on Wikipedia. Some of the open source solutions combine HDR with panorama features for photo-stitching which can be a bonus. On the down-side, these same open source programs are a bit more complex to use than the 3rd-party solutions such as Photomatix.

Various methods are also available for blending the 3 exposed images together: tone mapping, enfusing, and simple merging. Tone mapping probably offers the most variability of output and creativity while the other methods are very easy to use in order to create a simple merged image.

I'll leave it up to the reader to decide which software solution offers the best results since the artistic value of the results is truly in the eye of the beholder.

New Camera

2009-08-23T10:00:00.002-04:00

I purchased a new Canon 50D this past week. I upgraded for several reasons: better quality, more features, more options.

The improved quality comes from a significantly better processor and sensor system, resulting in more detailed and better defined images. The 15.1 MP is also enticing.

The camera is feature rich. The key features I was looking for was a much faster fire rate: shots-per-second in RAW format is 16. JPEG is at 30. That's incredible when trying to capture a particular shot or moment moment during which the subject is constantly changing or moving. With a rapid-shot approach, the odds are much higher of catching the "perfect" shot.

And the camera sports many new options, including the ability to drive it remotely from a PC. There are situations in which I desire to set up the camera in a particular location and then disappear so as to not detract from the subject (e.g. birds). I can go inside and "take the picture" with the click of the mouse on my PC and the subject is not interrupted by my presence and motion.

There is much more to the camera, and I am still reading the documentation to get the most out of it. In the end game, it makes for a nice addition to my push-and-shoot Canon Powershot G9, while side-lining my Digital Rebel XD (300D).

"Enhanced" Photography as Artwork

2009-08-16T13:51:00.003-04:00

Adobe's Photoshop is so feature-rich that it is very easy to enhance a photograph for art's sake. Perhaps, too much so.

By adding patterned stamps, textures and backgrounds that are free for the taking on the Web, alterations of a photo becomes trivial. Creativity is only in the mind of the beholder.

Another form of photo-enhanced imaging using Photoshop is to merge one or more photos together such that they blend or overlap with each other. From my perspective, this is more creative since it doesn't involve external graphic artifacts such as patterns and brushes to enhance a piece of photo image based art.

Here is a simple example...
The above image is composed of two simple overlapping or blended images, one of a stone wall, and the other of an open flame from a candle. The effect that it produces is that of a burning wall. While this may seem trivial, it eliminates the addition of artifacts that are very tempting to add to a photo such as "flame" patterns and the like which can easily be downloaded and added to Photoshop.

In essence, I prefer photo imaging without artificial artifacts that involves the blending, blurring or otherwise altering of two or more photos. This is not to say that artifact-based imaging is not artwork, it is just a form I do not prefer.

CGI as Artwork

2009-08-13T15:52:00.006-04:00

Computer generated Images (CGI) makes an excellent form of digital artwork, especially if the source images come from your own digital library of photos.

Such is the case when I use Nodebox or MathMap on my Apple iMac computer. Both offer programming against one or more photo images with very interesting results.

Nodebox accepts programming in Python, which isn't too tough to pick up from the many supplied examples that come with the program. And it has an extensive graphics library based on Apple's Core Image software for altering your photos in very exciting ways. Here's an example in which I read 20 random photos, applied slwurls, blurs and even kaleidoscope effects to each image and then merges them into one...
I plan to do much more with Nodebox. The catch? It has a memory leak such that I can only save about 5 resulting images at a time before I have to exit the program to recover the memory. From what I understand, no one is doing any further work on Nodebox so it is what you get as-is. So I simply restart it again after saving 5 images on a 4GB-of-memory iMac.

MathMap, on the other hand, has a simple programming language all of it's own, which is used to build filters that act on one or more photos. A common filter is called "Droist", which spins the photo on itself recursively.

Here is the result of one MathMap filter that creates a circular image...
Both programs offer almost unlimited effects, and it is only tempered by one's imagination, coding techniques and source photo images. Has anyone heard of other similar programs that work on the MAC?

Panoramas

2009-08-10T11:52:00.006-04:00

I have discussed panoramas in previous posts but wanted to cover them in more detail. Sprawling landscapes as panoramas make for great wall art.

First, it helps to have a panorama that is great to view, whether close up or far away. Panoramas of the Swiss Alps or New York City come to mind. But you can capture your favorite panorama while on vacation.

Assuming you don't use a camera's built-in landscape feature, the steps to capturing a good panorama are:

1- Find a great sprawling landscape worth capturing, such as mountain vistas.
2- Mount your camera on a tripod if at all possible, all though not an absolute requirement.
3- Set up your camera: Expand your zoom out as much as possible, set the aperture and and exposure settings for the middle of the landscape and then lock them in.
4- Start snapping pictures, panning from the left-most angle to the right-most side. Overlap each shot by 20 percent or more.

Once you've returned home, the trick is to find the right software to stitch your overlapping photos back together so that they can be saved as a high-resolution panorama.

Programs that offer photo stitching include:
- Adobe Photoshop (Windows, MAC)
- Doubletake (MAC)
- Hugin (Windows, MAC)
- Gigapan stitching software (Windows, MAC)

Doubletake does a nice quick-and-dirty stitch with some overlap exposure issues that don't come out as cleanly as one would like. Hugin is open sourced, and provides much more granular fine tuning if you know what you are doing. Photoshop seems to provide the best quality but is an expensive solution for those that don't already have a copy. And Gigapans's software is based on the software developed for stitching together the thousands of Mars images taken a few years back, and does a very good job as well.

While both Hugin and Gigapan's software are both free, Photoshop and Gigapan appear to provide the simplest interfaces with the best results.

Here is a panorama made from stitching 8 overlapping images using Photoshop:

Once stitched together with Photoshop, Apple's Aperture was used to enhance the colors and brightness of the foreground. It should be noted that Photoshop will save huge images in a format called LARGE DOCUMENT FORMAT (LDF), which many software photo editing programs simply can not handle. So in this case, I had to save the image in a scaled down size from within Photoshop to be able to save it as a JPEG rather the LDF.

Next, you need to consider what you want to do with your panorama. If the obvious answer is to print it, then you either need to utilize preexisting print services that can handle a very long and narrow print at high resolution, or do it yourself.

If printing it yourself, you can find long paper at Redriver's pano inkjet paper website. They also offer panorama (long and narrow) greeting card inkjet paper. Be sure to read their documentation on "how_to". For example, Canon printers can not handle lengths greater than 23.39 inches. And make sure you've stocked up on plenty of new inkjet cartridges before you actually start the print process!

Artwork Published on Redbubble

2009-08-08T12:56:00.005-04:00

I have published much of my digital artwork on Redbubble, my sales website.

Some of my works...

I am not sure how effective this sales website is, but hope to find out in the coming months. And I am also going to start hunting for similar sites, but ones in which bulk image uploads can be performed. The Redbubble site only permits single uploads, which take forever.

New Photo Imaging Artwork Business

2009-08-02T13:18:00.005-04:00

I have started a new business, and am beginning to populate a new website in support of the business. Sunrise Digital Artworks is all about providing services in support of photography and digital imaging as artwork.

I don't expect to make much money at first, and will depend on some serious marketing. I initially included a new blog along with the website, but decided in the end that it was best to continue this blog and simply reference it from the business-end.

I've been working on logos, business cards and the like. I've acquired all of the necessary licenses and other specifics to start a small business and can tell you that it was somewhat of a learning process. The total cost to get up and running came to about $120 (USD).

One new aspect that I am including in this new business is the provision of panoramic landscapes, through various photographic and software means. The following illustrates an example in which 8 separate photos were digitally aligned to create this panorama / vista...

From Landscapes

Stay tuned as I build upon this and other "imaging as artwork" services.

Blog Under Construction

2009-08-01T15:01:00.003-04:00

I am currently going back through my blog entries and bringing them up-to-date since the original hosting photo Website in which many of the included images were sourced has since gone out of business.

I am in the process of adding these photos back into the posts.

Picasa For The Mac

2009-01-13T12:53:00.002-05:00

There are no surprises here, and this program works pretty much as it does for Windows. Some things to take note of:

- Use the menu-bar option "Tools" > "Folder Manager" to ensure it doesn't scan those special image folders that are artifacts of other graphic programs.

For example, I use Gigapan's software to generate giga-pixel images. The actual results of the software is hundreds of images making up small slices of a much larger image. I don't need these cataloged by Picasa.

- Expect it to use about 45% of unused CPU every time you start it as it scans your hard drive for new images to add.

- Experimental: Find Duplicates

This code displays images it thinks are duplicates. It doesn't exactly provide a good mapping of the duplicates, but simply displays the images and their folders. Care must be taken for images from iPhoto, for example, since iPhoto keeps a thumbnail of every picture in it's library which could be construed as a duplicate.

Also, moving or deleting images via Picasa that are managed by another program such as iPhoto could very well lead to serious problems with the other programs. It is not clear if Picasa properly manages the movement or deletion of an image with respect to that other program.

For example, Picasa has identified duplicates in iPhoto "event" categories. So I am being careful to delete the duplicates by finding and removing them using iPhoto rather than Picasa.

And duplicates found in the same folder or "event" are easy to find. It will take some bouncing around, though, if the duplicate is a copy in another album or event. It is not clear from iPhoto's perspective if these are really duplicates or alias pointers to the original...ugh!

The only value this program offers, in my view, is the collage creation. You can select a group of photos and have Picasa merge them into a collage. This seems to be vastly improved over the last time I used this on Windows, with various options for resizing and placement of each individual image...very nice.

Google's Picasa for MAC

2009-01-06T10:20:00.002-05:00

Google has released it's first beta of Picasa for the MAC and I am test driving it now. Key features include:

- read-only approach to image editing
- location based image store rather than keeping a copy of all images
- tight integration with Google Photos and other Web photo hosting sites
- easily handles very large photo libraries (iPhoto and every other image it can find on your MAC).

The video can be viewed here. As I start to test out many of the features I'll blog about them here. Having used Picasa on Windows a year ago, all I can say is, "it's about time!".

More coming...

New List of Blogs

2009-01-04T09:39:00.003-05:00

000Webhost is a site that offers free content hosting, including a master list of Blogs. I have added mine to the list to see if it results in more readers. It is touch to compete against Facebook and Flickr, although there are many successful photography blogs out there.

This new site can be found by clicking on the following...

The above link-back offers some value in "findability", although I don't yet understand it's value unless I were running a business listed in the directory. What does this have to do with digital photography? Nothing! Arghhh!

Photo Manipulations

2008-12-20T16:16:00.003-05:00

I haven't posted to my Blog for some time, having been deeply involved in figuring out how to programmatically manipulate my photos in new and clever ways.

There are a number of open source projects focused on systems that enable modifications to one or more photos, such as Processing, MathMap and Context Free. It should be mentioned that MathMap can be used both as a plu-in to Gimp as well as a stand-alone OS X program.

Instead of the above, I chose to use NodeBox because of its strong image manipulation capabilities. Using the Python language combined with NodeBox's strongly typed image manifpulation library routines, it is a simple matter to process one or more images and save the results in various formats including PDF, Quicktime movie, and in an image format (TIF, JPG, PNG, etc.).

The results of my first attempt can be viewed below in the slideshow. I first wrote an Automator process to capture all of my 7000+ photos in iPhoto as thumbnails and store them in a separate directory. I then worked on a NodeBox program (Python code) that reads 40 random thumbnail images and adds transparency, swirl, kaleidoscope, hue changes and other image effects to get the final compsition which is then saved as a JPG file in another directory. All of the image affects are from NodeBox's "core image" library which offers quite s large selection of image processing options.

Here are my first results...

The above images are created by running a script within the Nodebox environment and can not, therefore, be saved and used by others unless they also have Nodebox installed with the full suite of supporting libraries. I will spend more time playing with the various permutations before moving on to Ruby and Objective-C for a more native approach to image manipulation which can be easily used by others as a native OS X application.

More Macro Photography

2008-11-25T15:03:00.004-05:00

As I continue to work with my new macro lens, I have become addicted to the process and the results.

First the process. It is very time consuming, and the toughest part is finding subjects which are very interesting to see when magnified 2x to 10x or more. This is easier said than done, since many objects are simply mundane when magnified.

Next, the photography requires very accurate focusing, since the slightest change will result in an image which is mostly or completely out of focus. Often times the subject will be focused on the point of focus based on my camera's auto-focus settings, making the surrounding areas out of focus depending on the field of range. It is best to use the largest field of range possible to get as much in focus that the lens(es) and camera will handle.

I try to use the camera's viewing built-in magnifier, which displays the center of the subject at a higher magnification when my camera is in manual mode. This helps me see the accuracy of the focus with greater clarity to ensure a good shot. But to play it safe, I will take several shots with slightly different focus settings, and it isn't until I import the results that I can really tell which shot can in perfectly focused versus those that didn't.

Lighting is also a critical component. I have used my hands to shield the subject from various angles to produce different back-lighting affects that can easily enhance a shot.

Since I avoid using the flash or special light, I typically have a much larger exposure setting which requires great stability through the use of a good tripod and the camera's timer setting. I can normally get away with a 2 second timer setting, but occasionally will have to use 10 seconds if the subject is potentially going to move as well.

I hope to post more images as I find more and more subjects. Just when I think I have exhausted everything around the house, I think of something new which could produce fantastic results :o)

Macro Photgraphy

2008-11-19T15:10:00.006-05:00

After my so-so affair with a very inexpensive (i.e. cheap) microscope, I decided to pinch in for more expensive macro lenses. I purchased a combo-set: +1, +2, +4 and 10x as well as a separate 10x Opteka H2 lens. These lenses all required an additional adapter for my Canon Powershot G9.

At first I found it impossible to focus on anything. After much trial-and-error I discovered that I needed to be very close to the subject being photographed. Using a tripod was also a must since all of the images I took were without flash and required a longer exposure time. I took all of the photos in manual mode, using the camera's 3x2 digital viewer to set the aperture, exposure and focus.

I am quite pleased with the initial results. I started with the combination lens, all screwed in a stack. The +1 lens makes it possible to focus the lens slightly closer than it does in macro mode, the +2 slightly closer than the +1 and the +4 slightly closer than the +2. The 10X adds the true "macro" to this stack when they are all screwed together in the proper order.

this shot was taken with the full stack of lens, and is a closeup of a ceramic tile:

From Small Stuff

Here is the ceramic tile for reference purposes:

I then tried out the 10x Opteka lens with some amazing results. Here are grains of salt on top of the bottom of a small clear glass:

From Small Stuff

And the following image is of a glass oil lamp which has air bubbles in the glass:

From Small Stuff

In a nut shell, I am quite excited by these results. They are crisp and look spectacular on my 24-inch full-screen iMac. It should be noted that I did touch up each of these photos with Apple's Aperture to enhance the colors and clarity.

Now it is time to find more subjects for my macro explorations.

Photrade Photosite In Hard Times

2008-11-15T14:29:00.003-05:00

It would appear that the downturn in the market has directly affected Photrade, like many other Web 2.0 upstarts. This site is used for hosting photographer's photos and as a store-front for photo-related merchandise.

Read the details here.

I am hoping they can keep the site running and merchandise flowing since it offers a unique opportunity for amateur and professional photographers alike.

Photography Through a Microscope

2008-11-10T15:14:00.006-05:00

I have been playing around with a microscope I purchased, which offers a magnification of 40x, 100x and 400x.

Unfortunately, the platform on which the object is being viewed lies is broken such that I can not get a perfectly focused object to display. I got what i paid for in terms of the microscope, but using a manual vise I was able to take photos of images at 40x. Anything greater comes out too distorted.

The other challenge is proper lighting. At a magnification of 40x a good flashlight that can narrow the beam down to a small spot worked okay. Anything at a greater magnification required greater light, and I tried a very bright halogen lamp which cast light through the cheap plastic of the microscope itself resulting in brown-tinted images.

I ended up at Home Depot and purchased about 10 different PVC pipe connectors which enabled me to marry my Canon Powershot G9 to the microscope lens after removing the top screw-on eye-piece. Since the fittings were not perfect I used masking tape around the scope's tube to add a buffer which allowed the camera lens to fit more tightly for a more direct shot down the scope's tube and lens.

I adjusted the camera settings to "micro" from landscape, zoomed the lens out all of the way and turned off the built in flash. I also turned off red-eye and other camera features which I found were affecting the image such as full-time auto-zoom. After 20 to 30 shots I found that the camera battery would run out since I was extensively using the camera's 3-inch TFT screen to visually find and sharpen the image to be photographed.

So my first attempt was to photograph a silicon wafer full of microchips that I have. The wafer is quite scratched from too much use-and-abuse, and many of these scratches appear in the resulting images. I took about 40 photos of various positions on the wafer, used Aperture to touch each up and create a rectangular zoomed region from the original circular images.

From Collages

The next image is of all of the microchip images that I enhanced in Aperture and from which I created the resulting collage using Photoshop...

From Collages

The lessons learned from this experience are:

Don't scrimp on a cheap ($25) microscope.
Minimize the magnification to something more reasonable like 5x rather than 10x or greater unless highly magnified images are desired and the proper lighting and camera setup is available.
Establish a very stable platform from which to set up the microscope since very slight vibrations can result in image blurring.
Use the camera's timed settings (I used 10 seconds for each shot).
Find a good reference for marrying the camera to the microscope. I used this site as a good starting reference.
Be patient and be prepared to experiment since not everything looks great under magnification.

Working with Collages

2008-11-02T13:16:00.009-05:00

Photo collages can provide a very effective means of presenting multiple images in a collective manner, with each image having a common thread to the others. In other words, each image relates to the others in the collage based on the subject matter or theme (family photos, winter scenes, etc.).

One technique I commonly use is to vignette the images to soften the edges, such that they better blend into the background and avoid having a very hard boundary between each. I use Photoshop and an action I created to build softened edges using the "feathering" feature.

As I collect and distribute the multiple images throughout the collage, I find that each image's placement is critical in relation to the others. Sometimes it is not as easy as this sounds, based on the effect or effects I want to produce.

Take the following floral collage as an example:

In the above example, I want to spread the various colors evenly throughout the collage the best that I can, while also doing the same for the floral shapes within each image. To accomplish this I often resort to adding a layer at the top consisting of an inverted image which provides a sort of colored negative, providing a better view of the colors and patterns, and their dispersion through the collage, as seen in the following image of the same collage as above...

From the inversion I can see the shape distribution much more clearly, and likewise for the color dispersion.

For example, in the top row I see a black-pedaled flower (5th from the right) and a similar flower and color pattern in the bottom row (6th from the right). I also notice that on the bottom row, the two most-right images (6th and 7th from the right) are somewhat similar. So I decide to swap the bottom row 5th-from-the-right image with the bottom row 1st-from-the-right image to offset the effect of the same colored and patterned flowers being so closely co-located. Here is the resulting change...

While this is only a slightly noticeable change, I will repeat this process over and over to give me the results I am looking for in terms of proper dispersion of the various images. This "dispersion factor" is dependent on the number of images making up the collage, with the more images the greater number of possibilities...depending on the specific images making up the collage, of course.

By simply toggling on-and-off this inversion layer at the top of the layer stack of images, I can easily see my negative for further image placement adjustments as desired.

Other Photo Blogs

2008-10-26T10:12:00.003-04:00

I have been investigating other blogs to find out what others are doing, what they are interested in or focused on, and what is interesting from a content perspective. The nature and form of photography-related blogs varies from the simple (just posting of photos) to the more interesting (stories to go along with the photos, special and unique subject matter).

I am now just publishing my blog in other photography blogs to see if anyone is interested in what i have to say, or focused on my subject of photography as artwork and what it takes to go from simply photos to very interesting subjects. One such blog site is...

It is somewhat not surprising the nude photos are more popular than other subjects, while special, unique subjects (e.g. slow motion photography, super-macro imaging) are also very fascinating. Blogs of trick shots, those that present a form of optical illusion, are another favorite among many. Software makes up a great part of this latter subject, allowing objects to be cut-and-pasted from one photo into another (although some are truly novel in their natural state).

I would be very interested in hearing from others what thy consider interesting blogs vs. those that are more mundane.

I would like to hear from others of their interests and what is considered mundane. Don't hesitate to post a comment or two on my blog.

Time Lapsed Photography

2008-10-26T09:40:00.007-04:00

While I don't have a DSLR camera that can take time lapsed photos, I have figured out how to simulate the affect with software. The key is to take multiple images fairly close together time-wise, and then blend them together with software. Photoshop's "Merge to HDR" (High Dynamic Range) will merge still photos into a single image, overlapping changes to the best of it's ability. Alternatively, Bracketeer or any HDR-capable stitching software does the same thing.

With some trial-and-error I found a simpler solution. I loaded a series of six like images taken 1 second apart into separate layers of Photoshop, and then I changed the opacity to 50% for each layer. I found that by moving layers around I could easily bring forward the key object (the bird on the feeder) into focus depending on it's position and composition within the six photos...

While the feeder is slightly blurred from wind-generated motion during the shots, the bird can be seen in various poses, providing the effect I was looking for. Any software that offers layering and opacity-per-layer setting can provide this type of effect.

Once I had this image created, I played around with another multi-image set to alter the coloring for a more interesting effect resulting in the following...

The shadowing effect is most interesting, and it was critical to place my camera on a tripod and use the built-in 2-second timer to start the images. In this fashion, the blending of near identical images is more accurate with the obvious exception of the object that is moving.

Action Shots

2008-10-20T10:50:00.007-04:00

Capturing a subject in action can offer very interesting results.

Blurring can enhance the subject, which can be achieved by extending the exposure time while adjusting the aperture to compensate for more light coming into the camera. Here, I have captured a cardinal just launching into flight which offers a very nice blurred effect...

Depending on the ISO setting, it may be necessary to turn on noise reduction on the camera if it has this feature.

On the other hand, capturing an action shot in freeze-frame mode can also offer a nice perspective if the subject is normally very active with much motion...

In both cases, the results can be stunning and very pleasing. Experimentation with my camera was required to get just the correct settings for both situations.

And here is an interesting shot of a bird in motion, made by taking multiple images just seconds apart and merging each into a separate layer in Photoshop such that one merged into the next. This is a good technique for subjects that move in a stationary postition...

Displaying Images In Novel Ways

2008-10-19T12:58:00.004-04:00

With a blog like this, simply uploading a static photo is fairly straight forward and presents a 2 dimension view of the photo in various resolutions and sizes.

But there are some novel approaches to displaying images, all of which use Flash. Google's photo repository will allows me to generate the necessary HTML to embed a slide-show from images in one of my Google photo (a.k.a. Picasa) online albums. Here is an example of my album of greeting cards...

Another example of using Flash is TiltViewer, and interactive 3-dimensional viewer for a collection of images. Paul van Roekel has provided a nice site that describes how to interface this with Google's Picasa (Windows-only) image viewer. While not as direct and simple, it does a nice job of presenting multiple images in a novel manner.

I've found another more versatile approach for the Apple MAC using Brothersoft's Bannerzest, a program that generates a slide-show from a library of images. Like TiltViewer it too uses Flash technology. But it's interface is simple: you just pick a template that you like and click to publish the results. Then upload the resulting HTML to your hosted Website and you have an instant "banner" of images.

All of the above are good solutions, and the easier to implement (Goggle's Picasa Web Albums and Bannerzest) are my preferred choices.

Leveraging 3D-like Views of Photos Via Cooliris

2008-10-18T08:58:00.006-04:00

If you publish your photos on the Web, Cooliris is definitely very "kewl" to pursue. It is a plug-in for your Web browser (or those viewing your photos) that turns your entire screen into a visual map of very high fidelity images of your photos. To some, you may recall this originaly came out with the moniker of Piclens.

If you publish your photos on Google's Photo Picasa Website then you get Cooliris capabilities without doing anything special on your part. Other Websites such as Flickr are also enabled for Cooliris.

And if you host your own photo Website, Cooliris also provides you the necessary HTML code to embed and instructions to enable this very slick feature on your site.

So what does this Cooliris plug-in provide?

Click on the Cooliris icon in the upper right-hand corner of the search field of your browser and your screen will be transitioned to a 3D-like wall consisting of rows of your (or other's) photos.
Click on any photo to see it in the highest available resolution.
Click on the icon in the lower left corner and you can view the photo in fullscreen mode.
Navigation bar is available for moving forward or backward through the photos.
Search field to find popular Websites for other photos
Simply hit ESC to return to your normal Browser window

Here is a screen shot of an example from my Google Picasa photo page...

And even better, you can simply find photo libraries based on categories: Technology, News, Sports, Business, Fashion, etc... the list of categories continues to grow.

This browser plug-in turns your experience viewing photos into something akin to Apple's iPhoto but with a virtually with an infinite library of photos. This is a very nice and effective feature worth pursuing, especially if you host your own photo Website. Here's my plug: spread the word so others start installing the Cooliris browser plug-in and begin to reap the benefits. And yes, it works with Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Making A Living From Digital Art

2008-10-15T12:43:00.005-04:00

It can be very tough to make a living from digital imaging and art.

Wedding, graduation and similar "production" photography seem to be one of the more lucrative means, but they come with catches. First, this for of imaging may not be considered art by many. Second, amateur photographers that get into this business can fall on the short side of litigation or small-claims court in which the recipient of the product is not pleased with the results (did not get what they paid for).

Stock photography is another business that is fairly saturated with entrepreneurs. Merchandise from images in the form of tee-shirts, mugs and the like can be obtained from various sites such as Redbubble. See my specific Redbubble sales site for a specific example.

Business cards and mimi "Moo" cards can be another business opportunity but necessarily a burgeoning one that reflects digital imaging as art. Software such as Business Card Composer for the MAC enables you to create your own creative cards to meet your specific business needs.

Greeting cards strike a possible avenue, but good marketing and business model should focus on profit or break-even costs for the end-to-end process. Take my Greeting Card Site as an example. In my case, I offer the cards on a break-even basis. But my labor is not factored in, which I excluded for now since I relied on my preexisting stock of photos for my cards. Setting up the Web Site and publishing the cards took some time and effort though, but is a one-time effort unless I decide to make significant enhancements. I used free Google Web site services for to minimize my overhead.

Enlarged, framed photos can be sold at art stores, sidewalk fairs and similar venues, but there is usually an initial setup fee or "juried" fee that can only be recuperated by selling this art at a considerable markup.

Besides the quality of the finished product, timing can also be critical. In a down market, the demand is typically lower.

I have read a number of Blogs on the subject and there is a deluge of amatuer photographers hoping to make some money in their endevors only to find that the market is saturated and demand is low. A few have been successful by focusing on what is truly creative, and pricing to sell.

It is also very beneficial to advertise, by following and posting to the thousands of photography blogs ... to differentiate oneself from the rest of the pack. This can be very time consuming but worth the effort over an extended period of time.

Net: find a marketable product or niche, build a good business case and market it through numerous venues.

Digital Procesing Workflow

2008-10-08T10:07:00.004-04:00

Taking a hundred or more shots per session can consume quite a bit of my time. If I take a trip to an area of interest, I can easily come home with 1500 shots or more. To optimize my time I've established a process that makes the best use of my time while helping me best organize to work flow from start to finish. The result is better management of my time while effectively identifying and processing (optimizing) my photos for their intended targets:

Delete photos

As I take shots I occasionally come across a real dud. Rather than leaving it on my camera I quickly erase it from the memory card so I don't have to deal with it later...if time allows. Sometimes, I am taking quick sequence shots which doesn't afford me the time and I'll then leave them for deletion during post processing.
Photo import

It is highly recommended to use a workflow style program such as Apple's Aperture or Adobe's Lightroom. I use Aperture for most of my photography, while special photography such as that for giga-pixel processing has it's own workflow tools (e.g. Gigapan Sysatems with it's own process).

When importing, I find it important to import either into a general "work" project with no specific categoriztion or into a new project that better represents the photos taken. The "work" project is used when the photos are from a number of separate "shoots" and once I've processed them I move them into their more appropriate project based on the subjecet matter. This can be more time consuming but allows me the ability to start with a wide range of subjects and then filter them down to their appropriate project folders for easier location at a future point in time.
Multi-pass processing

I make several passes of my photos once they have been imported. The first pass is focused on rating the photos using a numeric system built into Aperture: 3 = okay, 4 = good, and 5 = fantastic. I don't bother with a rating of 1 or 2 since I typically would use these for so-so pictures that would not get further attention anyway.

I also delete photos that I didn't have time to delete on the carera's memory card, or which simply doesn't deserve further consideration due to extensive blurring, really bad exposure, etc..

I make a "smart" album from all photos in the specified "project" of all of the images rated greater than 2. I can use this new album to finsih processing the keepers.

I then make a second pass on the those in the smart album (rated 3, 4 or 5), making the photo enhancing changes to improve the shot's lighting, contrast, colors, and other assorted tweeks. I also add keywords to these to help categorize them for later post-processing.
Post-processing

If time is aainst me, I then take the results from the above and move them to another source for final processing: Photoshop import folder, iPhoto for screensaver, etc.. Otherwise, I'll do some additional enhancements directly from within Aperture: special editing to remove artifacts and improve the overall look and feel of the "5" rated photos.

If targeted for import to Photoshop, they'll go into a sub-folder labeled "Photoshop Import" and I'll use Photoshop to add the photo to a collage, resize for a greeting card, and so on. If targeted for a Web site, I'll copy them (export) into another folder specific to that eb site for easy identiification and uploading.

While this may not seem to be overly innovative thinking, it does allow me to quickly process my photos in a consistent and effecient manner while allowing me to get the most out of my work. Digital photography is time consuming. Don't let anyone make you think otherwise. Optimizing your time is critical to your work and time for other related and different activities.

I would be very interested to hear what others do that is different from my defined process above. Please comment if you can...

Giga-pixel Panoramas Using Gigapan System

2008-10-05T08:59:00.006-04:00

I received my Gigapan Systems "head" a couple of weeks ago, which is used to take high resolution panoramas using a point-and-shoot DSLR (in my case, a Canon Powershot G9). The "head" is the hardware which mounts onto a tripod, and which holds the camera. Once programmed, it will take hundreds of pictures based on my predefined upper-left and lower right corner of the target area I want to shoot. It then starts taking pictures at full zoom from left to right over a period of 5-15 minutes. It also supports 360 panoramas which I have yet to try.

Once the many images have been captured in my camera, it is then necessary to use multi-image stitching software to stitch the images together, blending and aligning as necesary, to form the final giga-pixel panoramo image. Gigapan offers their own stitching software which was derived from software developed to stitch together the thousands of images taken by the MAR Lunar Lander. The stitching process can take 1-to-3 hours, depending on the platform processor and memory and number of total images to stitch together. I find that 200 images can take about 1.5-to-2 hours on my 2.8 Ghz dual core iMAC with 4GB of memory.

Once the images are stiched together, the Gigpan software user interface provides the necessary interface to upload the image to their image site at Gigpan.org. Only smaller images that are 2MBs or smaller can also be exported as TIFs or Photoshop RAW file formats. The upload process to gigapan.org is also time consuming due to the large size of the panorama (~1GB for a panorama made from about 250 images), and can take at least 1-to-3 hours as well. The catch is that the resulting image can not be "enhanced" since the end-to-end process is a closed loop process and their is no opportunity to modify the resulting image unless some other 3rd-party stitching software is used rather than that from Gigapan Systems.

All in all, the process is quite fun and exciting, but it is also quite time consuming. My panoramas can be viewed here. Click on a particular image, and you'll find that you can move around and zoom in and out on detail at an exceptional level which makes these quite interesting depending on the particular panorama. My first set of panoramas lack a certain level of clarity at the high-zoom level due to improper camera settings. There are many DSLR camera settings that must be disabled or adjusted to get it just right. Trial and error is required until I get it just right, and I am still working on refinements. I am now looking for new and interesting subjects for future panoramas, with a test of a 360-degree panoramas, macro panoramas, and night panoramas. Suggestions are welcome: serious, funny, or otherwise...

Here is what the head looks like...

Collages

2008-10-02T09:47:00.004-04:00

I truly enjoy creating collages of related scenes or objects. If done well, the results can be printed down and hung on my wall without question.

Picking "like things" to include in a collage is the first task. I've created collages of doors, flowers, and glass-works. Next, I have to decide on the overall canvas size, and typically choose 13 inches by 19 inches since this is the largest paper I can print to on my Canon i9100 inkjet printer. This also provides for adequate space for each of the individual images within the collage (about 2 inches by 3 inches each).

There are a number of software tools that can be used to auto-generate a collage. Google's Picasa is a simple tool that can be used on Windows. Since I am on a MAC, I can something like PhotoTiles. But neither utility offers the flexibility of individual image placement and only limited image spacing and background selection.

So I use Photoshop to read in each image into a separate layer, with two additional layers for background colors of white and black, respectively. First I read one of many images making up the collage and resize it to my 3x2 inch size with a 200 or 300 DPI setting. Then I copy and paste it into the master 13x19 inch image as a separate layer. Once I have all 20 to 36 images in a single Photoshop "image", I can then move each around to choose the best visual position for each. Obviously this positioning is somewhat subjective, but to get the desired effect (equal-distanced or similarly spaced) then it is a rather direct manner to place each appropriately.

I then add white and black backgrounds, each as separate layers, to see how the overall image looks against each. I then choose the background that is most visually pleasing.

Here is a collage I did a couple of years ago, in which I overlapped the various separate images to achieve a certain effect...

Another collage shows the spacing of doors against a black background. The black background causes the clear separation of doors from one another with less distinction among the many beautiful colored doors, while a white background results in a closer relationship of each door to it's neighbors and a much more vibrant focus on each door's colors...

Finally, there are some other effects that can be applied to each image to assist with the blending of each image against the other and against the background. In certain cases I use Photoshop to feather the edges of each image before adding each to the master. In this way, the images appear to have softer edges and easily blend with the background (white or black). An example of this can be found with the following collage...

With the above, individual image sizing, spacing and feathering creates a very unique collage.

Using an editor such as Photoshop or Pixelmater provides the artistic value through various advanced features with results in very high resolution that are otherwise lost with utilities that automate the creation of collages such as Google's Picasa or similar free software for Microsoft's Windows.

Objects As Art

2008-09-29T15:32:00.005-04:00

The concept of images of objects as artwork can be seen in light of the object in context to itself, its container, or in context to other objects in the same image.

For example, the following demonstrates objects in a bowl, with the colors of both the objects and the bowel offering a very pleasing look...

Object(s) shape, dimension and texture also play an important role. I like to try to portray softer shapes, although hard objects as a background to something softer can also be effective.

Likewise, a collage of objects can be viewed as a form of art. In the following case, a collage of flowers and plants seamlessly stitched together in a soft manner can be visually artistic...

Again, both the color and the objects themselves as seen next to each other presents a visual affect that is eye catching. Collages also offer a perspective of positioning, such that each included object is taken in context to that which it borders: on top, below, and to the sides. Many variations are possible in this context and it is to my discretion to position each object relative to the others in a form that is visually pleasing.

Gigapan Panorama Results

2008-09-29T13:20:00.003-04:00

After a couple of trial runs with the new Gigapan Systems panorama device, I took this image of the 18th hole out my back door, consisting of 135 separate images all stitched together using the software from their site.

The results are fairly impressive. It took approximately 4.5 minutes to take all of the photos (2 seconds apart). Then it is a simple matter of connecting the camera's memory card to my iMAC, and running the Gagapan Systems software to pull in the images and stitch them together. The entire directory for these 135 images and stitched results takes 1.15GBs of space on my hard drive.

The stitching process took over an hour: 9 minutes for photo alignment, 8.5 minutes for photo projection, and 55 minutes for blending of the edges to ensure a smooth transition amongst the entire 135 images. The resulting stitched image is 592 megapixels (65078 x 9100 pixels) stored in what appears to be a proprietary format that can only be uploaded and viewed grom Gigapan.org. Smaller results (e.g. 24 stitched photos) can be saved locally in TiF or RAW file format (format of TIF defines the maximum image size allowed).

The "stitching" process is managed by a program with a user interface that walked me through the steps to identify the target images, the format for blending (number of rows and columns) with the option to delete duplicate images taken by the device (user controlled), stitching process and upload to Gigpan.org. The stitching process can take 1-to-several hours depending on the total number of images, and while there is a pause/resume button it would be VERY nice if it had a pause-save/resume option during the stiching process so that it could be conveniently interrupted during the multi-hour process in the event it is necessary to shut down the PC. Likewise for the time-consuming image upload process, which also took a couple of hours.

Otherwise, the end-to-end system is very nice. Is this considered "art"? Perhaps, in the aspect of the subject matter, convenience of online viewing and the level of detail that can be viewed. Time will tell. Next on my agenda: find more interesting subjects for my next Gigapan images.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Announcement

2008-09-22T11:02:00.003-04:00

Adobe is to announce their next version 4 of their Creative Suite. I received an announcement that a webcast will be available:

To view the web broadcast, visit http://www.adobe.com/go/brilliantevent on September 23, 2008 at 9:00 a.m. Eastern

Hopefully there will be some very nice enhancements to Photoshop...?

Managing The Huge Plethora of Images

2008-09-22T09:05:00.004-04:00

One common problem everyone experiences is the hundreds or thousands of photos and image editing work that accumulates on the personal computer. Managing that can be a nightmare without setting up a few common-sense policies:

Establish a folder structure that makes sense with your workflow

This first solution helps manage the hundreds or thousands of files I deal with on a regular basis. While editing software such as Apple's Aperture has it's own library, consider then that it was necessary to develop projects, albums, etc. in line with the work I do.

Consider this as a means of categorization. By properly categorizing projects it is then much easier to find and work with them.

I tends to create directories based on the name of the software tools used to manipulate the images, and sub-directories for the actual input and results.
Keep the source files and consider throwing the rest out with the bath water

Everyone has a limit on storage. While I have plenty of storage, I don't want to clutter it up with intermediate files by the hundreds or thousands which were used in the creation of a project. So I tend to keep the source files (images) in whatever format they rely on knowing that I can always creat or generate the results again.

I also keep the results of my work, since often times they consist of much manipulation within a specific editor and do not necessarily result from the use of multiple external files.
Backup, backup, backup

I can not say enough about having adequate backup for your critical source images and results. Unless it was very difficult to create, consider all intermediate files as ancillary and dispensable. Several years ago my PC (Windows) crashed and I lost over a thousand high-quality pictures. I swore that this would never happen again.

I back up my backup, just in the event the primary backup fails. Redundancy ensures security in knowing that your data is recoverable.

Also, consider the form of your backup media. Many people use CD/DVDs for backup, not realizing that they typically have a lifespan of only 5-8 years. Tape will last for 50 years or more if stored properly. In 15 years, will we even have the hardware to read those CDs if necessary?

So what do I do? I have an Apple iMAC with 1 TB of storage, plenty it would seem for storing a ton of images and intermediate files. But I am careful not to turn it into a digital dumping ground since 1) the more files on the iMAC, the slower the performance (general truism), and 2) less clutter results in more efficient and effective productivity.

Along with this iMAC, I have a 500GB back-up device which is used exclusively for Leopard's built-in Time Capsule. I take care and selectively exclude directories that I simply don't need to back up, such as those containing intermediate files / images that can easily be re-created or exported.

I also have a 1 TB "Buffalo Terastation" network-attached (NAS device), to which I make semi-regular incremental backups of new files created that I want to keep. Files and folders backed up on this device may be redundant to that which is saved by Time Machine, and all the better if it is. This device also supports RAID (striping of files) in the event one of the 4 hard drives in the device goes bad the data is still recoverable.

Finally, I have an old DELL Windows PC which has plenty of DASD and is used strictly as a file server. I occasionally (once a month) copy files from my Terastation to this file server just in case major catestrophy strikes. It would be best if one of these backup solutions were offsite, but if a fire strikes, I'll run for my Terastation first and carry it out the door.

And as a last resort, it is always reasonable to backup photos to DVD or CD-ROM. While this media does not hold as many images, it certaining offers an archival solution that will be around for a while (but perhaps not 10 or 20 years from now).

Net: give some time to think about how you want to structure your files and folders that provide a logical and effective means for productive work-flow management. Then ensure adequate backup is included for disaster recovery.

Panoramas and Gigapan Systems

2008-09-19T16:08:00.005-04:00

I have always been a big fan of wide, landscape-type panoramas and have taken quite a few overlapping photos with the intention of stitching them together. I have used Photoshop's "Photomerge" feature as well as Doubletake, both of which provides excellent mixed-exposure overlap mapping. Although I also have Canon's Photostitch software installed on my MAC, I have yet to test it out for stitching multiple overlapping images into a panorama.

Gigapan Systems is into gigpixel panoramas, many of which can be viewed on their public hosting site, Gigapan.org.

Gigapan has just announced a beta program, which I am participating in, for a low-cost commercial digital imaging device for creating gigapixel panoramas using handheld DSLR cameras such as my Canon Powershot G9. Once I receive and set up the device, I will start posting my results to the above panorama site as well as completing survey / questionnaires from Gigapan Systems regarding my feedback on this new device.

The device tutorials / details are posted on You-tube.

I will post my findings here as well, in addition to references to the image results. More on this in the coming weeks...

Image Editing Plug-ins and Their Use

2008-09-16T09:39:00.005-04:00

While there are many editing software tools available, some support the add-ons called "plug-ins". These are typically 3rd-party programs that interface directly with the image editing software to transform an image in one of many ways. Some plug-ins are free, typically to allow for export of images into or from another application or Web site. These do not fall into the category of image enhancement and are therefore not covered here.

While Adobe's Photoshop probably has the largest following of supported plug-ins, Apple's Aperture is now slowly beginning to catch up with a number of 3rd-party plug-ins. The referenced site even categorizes the plug-ins based on their function and use. One of my favorites is Nik Software's Vivezza, which enables for the image enhancement using special hot-spots I define based on location in the image, size of the hotspot, and a set of controls for contrast, brightness, white balance, saturation, red/blue/green, etc..

This butterfly's blue and orange colors were enhanced using Vivezza on a friend's computer...

Sell photos on photrade | By digiman

The downside is that these plug-ins cost a good chunk of change, with Vivezza coming in at $250 for example. When considering plug-ins, it is best to try the demos first to ensure you are ready to get the value out of each for the cost you put into them.

A plug-in which provides good noise reduction for images taken in low lighting (or high ISO) can add significant value, and Noise Ninja is very good at doing this.

Many other plug-ins apply various transformations to an image for better or worse. I once applied a nice defused affect to a photo of one of my subjects (my dog) using a plug-in, and couldn't decide whether I preferred the transformed or original results. So I ended up printing both. Art is in the eye of the beholder!

Having too many plug-ins is not necessarily a bad thing, but can sometimes confuse with too many options. I prefer to stick with just a few that provide the most value based on the results. I would like to see a plug-in that applies all other plug-ins (using default values for whatever settings they support) and generate an output film sheet of the results so I can compare each and every one against the other. Sounds like a novel opportunity waiting to be developed!

Taking Good Photos

2008-09-12T12:14:00.005-04:00

I find that there are 3 rules of thumb to great photos:

Good equipment

Having a good DSLR camera and good lens can go a long way. I favor Canon cameras for their quality and large selection of high-quality lens. I also add advanced software image editing tools in with this since a so-so photo can be made much better with the right image editing software.

Knowing how to use both is also a critical factor. I regularly take my camera instruction booklet out and review it since I simply don't remember every feature and how to use it with my camera. Likewise with software, I try different effects as often as possible and I remember those which have a profound, positive result on the image(s).
Good subjects

Good images result from very interesting subjects. I also like to focus on one or two categories such as landscapes and collages. I am forever looking for a unique subject that will capture the eye and from which I can build a large library.
Good timing

I wish I had a dollar for every time I said, "I wish I had my camera with me!". Good equipment and subjects don't do me any good if I am not willing to bring along my camera and take more pictures more often.

The following picture was taken while walking my dog one day, when I just happened to have my camera with me and started taking pictures of stones on the beach. I added the lily in the middle from another trip to Thailand to add the perfect touch for this collage...

I used Apple's Aperture to enhance the colors, and Adobe Photoshop to pixelate the image slightly for a softer touch.

Canon Cameras I Use

2008-09-11T08:32:00.002-04:00

I am currently using two different DSLR Canon cameras:

Canon Rebel 300D

This is one of the original cameras in the Rebel line, offering 6.5 megapixels and EOS EF-S (automatic focus) lens system. The lens protrude into the camera and can not be used on other EOS-based Canon cameras.

I find this camera best for high detail using a zoom lens EF 100-300 1:5.6 . It uses a compact flash memory card or Microdrive. It is showing it's age in that the frames-per-second are slow, especially when taking pictures in RAW format.

With multiple lens, filters and other accessories, a camera bag is a must for this camera, as well as a sturdy but light-weight tripod.
Canon Powershot G9

This is a more compact camera, offering many of the advanced features of a DSLR with lens stablization and a higher 10.5 megapixels. But due to the smaller lens, photos that are zoomed out do not pick up uite the detail of that of the Rebel.

This camera doesn't quite fit into your pants pocket, but doesn't require a large camera bag either.

My desire is to upgrade to the new Digital Rebel Xsi (a.k.a 450D) or the Canon D50 (a bit too expensive for my tastes). Both offer much higher megapixel capture and much faster frames-per-second. There is a great review of the Rebel Xsi. The Canon D50 is very new and takes the well known D40 to the next step.

Editing Tools

2008-09-10T10:05:00.006-04:00

A plethora of various software programs are available for enhancing images in a multitude of ways. Here is my list of software I find most effective (in priority sequence, all supported on the Apple MAC):

Apple's Aperture

This program provides for image editing work-flow, from importing to exporting and almost everything in between. Photos can be saved in projects and albums within a project. Modifications to a picture does not affect it's master image. Image editing capabilities are impressive for normal JPEG as well as RAW images. And more third-party vendors are offering plug-ins on the level of Adobe's Photoshop. I use Aperture to categorize and do the initial editing of photos such as color enhancement and other visual improvements.

Features such as the new Dodge and Burn make this a very rich full-featured editor. It is worth giving a test drive via the 30-day demo.

I have read reviews regarding Adobe's Lightroom vs. Apple's Aperture and believe that Aperture comes out ahead in ease-of-use and features.
Adobe Photoshop

The power of Photoshop is it's strong features and layering. Like Adobe's Photo Elements, Pixelmator and other image editing software, layers play a key role in not only laying out multiple images onto a single canvas, but also allowing for the artistic enhancement through image-to-image filtering. A strong suite of plug-ins can make this a very powerful tool for image enhancements and touch-ups.

Each supports a variety of file output formats. Photoshop has a long history of image editing and supports both Windows and MAC operating systems. Pixelmator is new to the scene, much less costly, and provides MAC's OS X Core Image direct support (leverages the features and hardware of the MAC Leopard operating system).

Aperture and Pixelmator both support import and export to/from Photoshop (PSD file format support). On the other hand, Photoshop offers some very nice macro and batch features for processing multiple images in an automated fashion.

Pixen deserves mention as donation-ware, offering similar features to that of Gimp, a much more feature rich open source image editing package. I had tried Gimp and although it prerequisites the X11 library (extra installation option for the MAC OS X), I found it unreliable and it crashed quite often. Sometimes it simply pays to stick with 3rd-party software and pay the price (net: you get what you pay for in this case).
MathMap

This software for the MAC offers a slew of mathematical algorythms that can be applied to images to transform them into a multitude of various ways. Various versions exist: stand-alone program for the MAC, and plug-ins for both GIMP and Photoshop.

There are also a large number of filters that have been developed for MathMap to make it even more powerful, and it is worth taking the time to search for, download and install them ... even if it means using cut-and-paste to do the installation of new filters.
Braketeer

This is a neat third-party program that will take braketed photos and merge them together, producing an image that combines the best of all breaketed images in an automated fashion.
Dealing with various output formats

There are a number of programs to generate Web sites (JAlbum - free, Apple's iWeb - included with Leopard, RapidWeaver - 3rd-party from Realmacsoftware), which offering easy-to-use interfaces and themes for setting up and updating a photo Web site. I found Adobe's Illustrator to be a bit too complex for my simple needs.

Bannerzest, 3rd-party software, will take a folder of images and generate a Flash screen-show in various themes which can be used on a Web site.

Phototiles is donation-ware which very easily generates a single page of all of your images in a collage-style side-by-side layout.

Mikes Edge is freeware which has been around for a while, and offers a very effective means of quickly identifying and cutting out the foreground or background of an image (image masks). This can also be done in Photoshop and other editors, but this is all this software does and it does it very effectively.
Photostiching

Adobe's Photoshop and Doubletake offer 3rd-party solutions for stiching multiple images into a panorama. Hugin is an open-source solution that provides this same capability.
Creating thumbnails

Thumbscrew is free and does a good job of generating thumbnails. Thumbsup is another freeware program to effectively do the same thing.

There are many other graphic programs available, but I find the above list to offer the "sweat spot" for the creative work I do. In a future post I'll cover software with which various and interesting output results can be produced for purposes other than "publishing" or print.

Photos Don't Display

2008-09-09T14:37:00.004-04:00

Well, it looks like the photo links to Photrade, a new site for photo sharing and merchandise (currently in beta mode), is down and my photos are not displaying with the message "Access Denied".

I have reported the problem but no one seems to be taking any action to remediate. Bummers! I have pulled the photos until this bug is fixed.

Panaramas and Photostitching

2008-09-08T16:19:00.008-04:00

One of the interesting types of artwork I like to create is a panorama created by a multiple of images which are stitched together using one of a variety of software.

Photoshop's "Photomerge" command will stitch overlapping images together. Doubletake for the MAC is another great software solution to stitch multiple overlapping photos together in a seamless fashion. Some newer cameras also come with photo-stitching software, such as that from CANON.

Not all photos will seamlessly merge perfectly, depending on the various camera settings used for each of the individual photos to be merged. Unbalanced lighting is a typical problem that some software can handle easily while other software requires some manual altering after the photos had been stitched together.

Finally, some newer cameras offer a landscape mode which enables the results to be stitched together in combination with the camera's software. I tend to avoid using this feature since it affects the aspect ratio of the resulting photos which I prefer to leave alone.

Here is an example of a panorama using Photoshop for the merging of 5 different images:

Sell photos on photrade | By digiman

The resulting image will be much larger (megapixels), although it can be downsized when saving the results in a lossy format (i.e. JPEG).

Giapixel images can be created when stitching together not only landscape-style panorama's, but rather 2-dimensional images of very large scenes or objects such as the Grand Canyon, or large murals. Panoramio offers some very interesting results and is really worth checking out.

Image Editing

2008-09-07T13:12:00.008-04:00

The platform I use for image editing is Apple's MAC. After many years of supporting a Microsoft desktop for a Fortune 100 company, I realized that I spent more time maintaining the PC than doing actual productive work. The MAC is different in so many ways, but it allows me to be much more productive.

The image editing work takes a great deal of time, depending on what is expected for the image(s): how the image looks both visually and from the perspective of appeal determines how much work I put into editing it.

I first review all of the images I import from one of my digital cameras and rate the better ones. I then touch up those which have the potential for some other media while leaving those which have little value (poorly taken photo, uninteresting subject, etc.) alone.

I use Aperture to import and do the initial imaging work since it offers so many great features from easy-to-follow work-flow to powerful image editing capabilities. I'll discuss this in more detail in a later post.

I export "keepers" to iPhoto which I use for my MAC's screensaver.

I will then consider using one or more of a number of more advanced photo editing software if I want to consider the image as a potential piece of "art" to be used personally (hang on my wall), for public viewing and/or sale.

I enjoy taking multiple images and working them into a collage using various techniques for image manipulation, such as diffusing the border or highlighting contrasting subjects. A good example of this is the "Flower On Stones"...

With the above, I used Aperture to enhance each image visually, and then using Photoshop to being all the images into separate layers and placing them appropriately with the hard stones surrounding the softer lotus flower in the middle.

I use a number of image editing tools, each depending on what I want to develop from one or more images into an "artwork". I'll talk more about each of these in a future post.

I am always looking for ways to improve the results, and invite comments on what others might consider doing, for example, to the above "Flower On Stones" piece.

First Blog

2008-09-06T13:24:00.008-04:00

I am very interested in digital photography as a form of art, using various software solutions to enhance and build-upon one or more digital images.

One such example is my "Sunset Over Sunset" image created with Photoshop...

There seem to be hundreds of photo-related blogs, and My "Redbubble" Website offers amateur photographers such as myself a chance to share their work in various media and merchandise (e.g. mugs, tee-shirts, etc.).

I am hoping to use this Blog to cover work I have created and reference other notable sources.