Photoshop Tutorials

Image © PeteM2010

The Photoshop portrait assignment has been a great challenge and learning experience. The Internet tutorials are by and large well written and not too difficult to follow, but --- most are done on images a lot smaller than ours.

So, although some of the images end up somewhat similar to the finished tutorials, many do not! There’s been a fair amount of fiddling with Photoshop settings, which has for me produced interesting and often quite unintended results. Part of the fun!

Flash

Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro and Flash are all supposed to work together seamlessly - or so the advertising blurb tells us. Putting it  into practice has not proved to be quite so straight forward. Anyhow, this is the result of todays Flash experimentation:



  I coded (AS3) a stop button into the animation - the repetition can get a bit testing!!

(File size about 130Kb - takes a few moments to load)

May not load in Internet Explorer - use FireFox , Safari or any other W3C compliant browser!

Illusion/illusion

Illusion/illusion is a group exhibition at McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park developed around the theme of visual perception and deception. Through the work of four young contemporary artists, Briele Hansen, Justine Khamara, Dorota Mytych and Kit Webster, the exhibition exploits a full range of multi-media disciplines, ranging from photography and drawing, to video display systems and digital video projections. The exhibition explores contemporary themes ranging from social commentary to the enjoyment of pure abstraction. (Abstract from gallery web-site)

Dorota Mytych – Tea-leaf reading 2 (Video):

Still image from artists web-site

Spent all morning exploring the works, re-visiting the works, deconstructing the works and unreservedly enjoying the works. It took considerable time to fully appreciate the fine details and to participate in some of the video presentations, but wow, it was time very well spent. Go and enjoy! (Unfortunately – photography NOT allowed)

Melbourne 60 in 60

My first camera was a very simple plastic affair with only the basics of settings and a fixed focus wide-angel lens. The format was 6x6 cm (film), which made composition quite a challenge, although I have to admit that composition was not a big part of my vocabulary at that time. (Still struggling with that concept!)

I decided to relive the challenge of simplicity and a fixed focal length lens. So one day I spent 60 minutes in the CBD with a 4/3-format pocket camera (digital), fitted with a 20mm “pancake” lens (non zoom). Took 70 odd images, and from a selection made up this 60 second video. Excellent fun! 

Having spent too much time unsuccessfully uploading videos to Blogspot, I am now hosting the videos on YouTube. So far there hasn’t been codec problems!

Catching the Surf

Thought I’d spend a couple of days photographing surfers at Phillip Island, but as luck would have it – when the surf was up, the sun was not! Surfing photos taken on a grey day just don’t cut it – the water looks dull, the sky looks dull and the image looks dull! On a bright day however, this is the kind of result I’m getting:

If nothing else – whilst driving around checking the surf beaches I came across a flock of starlings, quite colourful when the sun catches them!

Images © PeteM2010

Just click on the images for a larger version

Fog

There have been some foggy mornings in the valley, so I set up the camera on a heavy tripod with a long lens and interval timer. (One frame every 1min 30 seconds). Made this short stop-motion video from the result.

Images © PeteM2010

In hindsight, the frame rate should have been increased to about one image every 30 seconds to make the video smoother and the camera mirror should have been locked up to minimize camera movement between shots. Next time!

UV

A “black light” or “UV light” is a lamp emitting light that is almost exclusively in the soft near ultraviolet range, and has very little visible light. Thought I’d have a bit of fun experimenting with paints that show a fluorescent effect with “black light” so I made this short stop-motion video. I am still having problems with optimal codecs, and blogger spits out anything it does not like. Pity it hasn’t got the decency to tell me what is OK– more research needed.

Video© PeteM2010

Frogs

I recorded the very noisy frogs in our dam this evening.  Here is a sample :




Requires Quicktime to work.

Codec

I have been testing various codecs (compression/decompression) in Premiere Pro for use with our video projects. Having a slow Internet connection makes it near impossible for me to upload large files to “Blogger” and it also seems a bit silly to upload a large file only for “Blogger” then to squeeze the file down to something more manageable.

However, the only codecs that have shown any promise for me so far are the Flash video variants. They give small file-sizes with reasonable quality.  Sadly “Blogger” does not accept any flavour of the Flash codecs.

Image © PeteM2010
 
Met this couple of wise owls on the farm today – but they had no answers either. Any suggestions anybody?