I'm not dead, I promise. Just super busy and slow at editing photos. Here are the pictures I've posted on my Instagram/Facebook, I posted these thinking I would be done with the rest in a week and I would have all photos and a write up on the blog, but clearly that hasn't happened. I promise I will work on them as soon as possible though.
Transparent Hood Experiment
As a kid, one of the coolest illustrations of cars for me were cutaway diagrams which showed off the internals of the car- the engine, the suspension, etc. Perhaps there already was an engineer in my brain at that time that drew me to those types of images, but it's always interesting to look at everyday objects from a completely different perspective. There's so much more to a car than just its external appearance, hidden away under all that metal and plastic, a whole different world.
Reaching the level of being able to draw those cutaways will probably not happen for me, but with the magic of today's digital photography and editing software, it's possible to achieve similar effects. I've seen plenty of transparent hoods from photographer friends, and I decided that this summer, I was going to try it for myself. Well, summer is basically over, and I hadn't tried out this photography technique yet. So, I put aside the moving-in-and-getting-ready-for-class stress and activities for one evening to take these pictures of my dad's Mustang.
I knew that the procedure is actually pretty simple: take two pictures of the car from the same position, one with the hood down and one with the hood up, adjust each picture accordingly, and then blend the two images together in Photoshop. Luckily, I have an awesome photographer friend who also gave me tips on making the picture look much, much better than my original result (I wanted to focus on the engine only but made the transparency too tight on the engine itself, he told me to make it a more gentle fade/transition). Thanks Alex Schreer for your help! I will definitely be taking more shots like these in the future. Seeing the metal vanish to reveal the engineering below both makes my inner-engineer and inner-child smile in delight.
My favorite from my experiment, and also the picture that helped me get into the hang of making transparent hoods with the help of my friend. There's something magical about seeing beneath the metal to see the heart of the car beneath.
A closeup of the heart that lies hidden beneath the hood, glowing orange from the sunset.
Trying to be more creative with the angles so it's not just a straight-on shot or a close-up shot.
Monochrome and Photoshop experimentation
As you can see just a few posts down, I reedited some old portrait photos of a friend. Now, for some reason, I really like the look of long hair partially covering the face/eye of people because I think it adds a dramatic, mysterious, edgy look to the person. And when I think "dramatic, mysterious, edgy" look, a lot of times I also think of black-and-white images that just look "gritty", sort of like an action comic/manga. I decided to give some of the photos a monochrome conversion, and then the handdrawn effect that I previously used with another friend's pictures. For both pictures I used the same process: I edited the picture in Lightroom, converted the picture to black and white in Lightroom, adjusted the picture some more to have more contrast between blacks and whites, loaded the picture into Photoshop, added the handdrawn effect, and messed with the curves to add more contrast. I have to say, I absolutely love the results, see for yourself:
While I love the handdrawn effect's results, I still love the original black and white conversions I made that were the base images for the handdrawn effect images. Take a look here, I think you'll see why I love them so much, too:
Also, this was from a little further back, but I played around with black and white conversions with the subject facing away. For these images, I feel that facing away provokes ideas of reflection and thinking. I added the black and white conversion and softened the image to make this reflection and thinking appear to be about the past, locked in memories but distant and untouchable.
Messing Around with Photoshop
While I was going through photos from our hikes, to annoy my friend I took random pictures of her. Some of them actually came out pretty well, although dark and noisy. But, I thought they would look good in black and white, and after adjusting everything and converting to monochrome, I realized I wanted the pictures to have a hand-drawn effect/look.
For the first picture, I wanted a more delicate, "angelic" photo, so I maxed out the value of Lightroom's Noise Reduction tool so the image was completely smoothed over. I then softened it before plugging it into Photoshop to create the handdrawn effect. The first image is the final product, the second image is what I started with.
For the second image, I decided to go with a more "gritty" appearance, so rather than reducing the noise in the picture, I amplified it by hardening all the lines in the image using Lightroom's clarity tool. I then plugged the photo into Photoshop to create the handdrawn effect. Again, the first image (third in the series) is the final product, and the second image (fourth in the series) is what I started with.
