that's strange

That's Strange

April 17, 2013

Fishing Guy chose "That's Strange" for this week's Headbanger's theme.  This is sure to be a whacky kind of fun!  Check out my  pals for their interpretations on this theme: Fishing  Guy, Katney, Imac and Lew.

What's the story behind this week's header?  Well, we had cookies at the office, and some of the brown sprinkles fell off.  I couldn't resist drawing on the napkin to share this twisted imagination with my cubicle mates.

She's perfect, but the expression tells you she thinks her grandpa is strange.

Some of us swim in the pool; others just take pictures of their feet.

A dragon on top to go with a Buddha hood ornament... perfectly normal, right?

I painted this in '82.  What can I say... I love surrealism!

Spilled coffee at work is the perfect excuse for staging a crime scene photo.

Does anyone else have a pet bee?

How about pet "goldfish?"

Awww.... now who doesn't love a good kung-fu fight at a wedding?

composite

When we baptize folks at church, I like to take pics. I think people have become accustomed to yours truly staking out a spot right up front. I try hard not to be too obtrusive or distracting. Then I give a free picture to each person who got baptized.

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I tried something new this time. I wanted to shoot high-speed continuous, so I couldn't use flash. This shot is a composite, showing Denise coming out of the water. I did it by using the collage feature in Google's free Picasa program, but first I edited out my pastor, so that he was in the last frame, but gone from the other three shots. That's why you see movement from Denise, but not Pastor John.

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A big thank-you to my buddy Pete, who pulled the microphone out of the picture for me. I like my images to have a simple subject and free from distracting clutter.

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Next time I do this, I will try using brighter bulbs in the cans, and switch from spot meter to area meter. What about you? Do you have any ideas or suggestions?

Christmas lights

Three years ago, I took some pictures using a Christmas tree with lights to produce some special effects. This year, I tinkered with some special effects to produce a Christmas tree with lights. Here is how I did it:

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Using a tripod at night, I manually focused on a blank wall.

The camera was set to exposure priority, and the two shots varied between 5 and 13 seconds. Then, I turned out the lights.

My hand formed an upside-down "V," to mask the shape, as I drew a zig-zag on the wall with a cheap, pen laser. (Remove any reflective jewelry so you don't blind yourself!)

In post-editing, I changed the red lines to green.

The ornaments were done by guessing where the tree was, and just dotting inside the triangle with the same laser.

Then, I put the two images together as an overlapping collage.

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I tried combining more exposures to get a variety of ornament colors, but I liked the simplest one best. I wonder what else we can try with light.

dancing embers

special effects

Sci-fi can be so much fun. And it's amazing how far special effects have come! Last night I watched Hancock, and there were probably less than ten minutes of that movie that weren't filmed with special effects of some kind. No... five. Cumulative. The story was unique, the acting was superb, and the effects were absolutely stunning.

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Do you remember the special effects from the original Star Trek television episodes? When I first watched those as a kid, I didn't give any thought to how realistic the effects were, since there was no practical way they could make things more true-to-life. But today, technology, techniques and budgets have improved to produce a quality that I could not have dreamed of as I watched the old black & white tube, back in the late 60's & early 70's.

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This photo was my own, low budget, special effect. I placed a toy upside down on a black shirt, and then created a multi-exposure collage with a moon picture from my archives. Neat, huh?

happy graduation

The Picassa™ photo editing program has an effect called Graduated Tint. I haven't used it much before, because I want my photos to look as much as possible like the whatever I saw, rather than a filtered or manipulated appearance. Aside from sunbursts, which are somewhat beyond my control, I hope to produce true-to-life images. But sometimes, our eyes can adjust to the clouds AND the darker subjects below as well. The camera can not.

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You can see how the sky's details got bleached out of the original photos at the top of this collage. The Graduated Tint is over-done just a bit to accent its effect, but if we put just a touch of it into these photos, they would look more like the skies that my eyes beheld on those particular days.

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What do you think? How do you feel about post-editing your photography? What have you found that works for you?