In week 9 the first presentation was of Anton MIrcea by Peter. Anton Mircea works in graphic design, advertising and art direction. We were shown a series of photos called the The Scream based on the famous painting. They all contain a figure with a ‘screaming’ mask in lots of settings. Apparently he does a lot of colour work but they don’t all look ‘photoshopped’.
He also designs Tshirts and has photographed teddy bears wearing his shirts. this is more light hearted.
Something Australian
Later in week 8 Chung presented the work of Andrew Brooks who is a digital artist, photographer and film maker who uses Photoshop a lot in post production. He uses a long lens to get a long depth of field with all the details. Some of his country scenes are beautiful. In a class he spoke about using bracketing (taking many photos of the same scene with different exposures, lighting etc to combine and get the same light and detail all over the photo) to get the glow of a sunset over a field while still having great detail in the foreground. In this way he creates images with atmosphere that is tangible.
In week 8 Daniel presented the Spanish digital artist Jerico Santander. Santander is also and freelance art director and photo illustrator and has already achieved a lot by the age of 25. He works by blending photography, 3D graphics and digital painting to create a detailed new image, a bit like a collage. He does a lot of commercial work, for example, for Asics he designed a runner running on a head made to look like the earth and the green man combined. It seems like a lot of work for a commercial but I want to keep looking at the pictures to take in all the detail.
This link shows some of his work in progress and gives some advice for aspiring .
In class we were given several images of power lines such as this one:
We were shown how to use the Pen Tool to draw a path over the lines we wanted to remove. We could then select Stroke Path (with Spot Healing Tool selected) and the line was replaced with information from the surrounding areas. I then used the Spot Healing Tool and Clone Tool to clean up any missed or smudged sections.
In this week’s class CJ showed us how to fill in the transparent pieces of a photo. This is particularly relevant when several images are combined into a panorama. The outer edge is uneven and has a transparent border. For example, the following panorama is the result of merging 4 photos.
Instead of cropping the image to straighten the edges we can fill in the missing pieces. To do this, I selected the whole transparent area and modified the edge so that it went a little way (3 px) into the image. Then I selected Fill (under Edit) and chose to fill the transparent area using Content Aware.
This was the result!
In this weeks lesson, Harry gave a class presentation on photographer Dustin Diaz. Dustin is from the US and works as an engineer. He also is a digital photographer and has a lot of contrast in his work. He does this by putting a lot of planning into the lighting he uses. In 2009 he gave himself the challenge to produce a photo a day to put on Flikr. Many of these photos were everyday scenes (but still good photos) but some show a characteristic style, with special lighting, accentuated contrasts, self portraiture and the use of text.
Dustin Diaz – self portrait
Commercial photography – family portrait
Magdalena Bors portrays a whimsical fantasy world. Many of her works are seen as if from a child’s level (eg underneath a table or bed). They remind of being a small child and building cubby houses under the furniture. She uses everyday settings but adds a touch of nursery rhymes.
Alexia Sinclair is a fine-art and commercial photographer based in Sydney, Australia
We looked at work from the Regal Twelve series in which she portrays women of history. These involve a lot of pre- and post- production work. I enjoyed seeing her work, perhaps because of the way she uses her imagination to build the photo into something larger than life.
In a recent lesson, our lecturer CJ, demonstrated how to take a series of photos to blend into a panorama.
On my family’s holiday in the Flinders Ranges, we visited Aroona Dam, the water supply for Leigh Creek. We’d just been to the Leigh Creek Hospital to get my husband’s leg stitched up but that is another story! When we were standing on the dam wall I took photos of the 360 degree view overlapping them and keeping the camera in the same position. Back home I used Photoshop to blend them into a panorama. The bars of the fence are distorted and have breaks.
Then I cropped the image, rotated it 180 degrees (upside down), made the length and width the same (square image), merged the layers (smart object) and applied a distortion filter (polarising) to create an Aroona Dam mini world.
My parents’ farm at Inman Valley has some great views so I took several photos to make into a panorama. I used a tripod this time to keep the camera steady. I had to ‘hide’ my car so it wasn’t in the photo, it’s not far away though. There is a lot of dry grass in the photo and because it was an overcast day there is not much contrast, perhaps this is something I could play around with.
Again I made a mini world but used only a portion of the panorama, which gives a different effect.
Today we learnt how to combine the parts of each image to create a new image. In the next photo we selected the building and erase the sky. Then we created a new layer containing another image with the sky we wanted. We moved the sky around to position it and erased a building that we didn’t want.
In a second exercise we were given the image of a night sky and lots of photos of balls and planets. Using the techniques learnt in the above exercise and previous classes we selected ‘planets’ and placed them in the night sky. This involved feathering edges were appropriate, scaling, transforming, and changing opacity etc of layers.
jerico Santander
judepitch 
Written
on May 11, 2012