Studio on a Shoestring» art

How to Elevate Your Snapshots With Adobe Lightroom Presets

deborahwolfe — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:00:59 +0000

How a Good Book REALLY Can Save the Day

I received Window Seat, The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking by Julieanne Kost, as a gift a couple of years ago. Periodically I’ll pull it off the shelf and browse, think, dream and ruminate my way through it. Ms. Kost is a trainer for Adobe Photoshop software and brings a unique perspective to photography. Basically she spends over 200 days a year flying. When she’s not flying, she’s teaching. Doesn’t leave a lot of time for creating. Yet she found a way to indulge her creativity as she soars through the air. It is her view from….the window seat.

Rowboat Media, the website design firm I co-founded and am a partner in, has been going full steam ahead for quite some time now and I haven’t really been shooting much. As a matter of fact it has seemed to me that my photography muse has been on extended holiday. But that doesn’t mean I don’t file visual ideas away in the deep, dark recesses of my mind.

On a recent holiday of my own, I brought along one of my trusty Canon point and shoot digital cameras. After having been a professional photographer for more than 20 years, I have had to work HARD to convince myself it is okay for me to take snapshots and to allow myself the freedom and convenience of a point and shoot. Not every single thing I do has to be a WORK OF ART. I am being completely serious. This is one of the problems for artists and creatives. We’re driven to create, hate ourselves when we can’t and hold our work to an often unattainable standard.

In any event, there I was at the shore again and feeling kinda blah whatever. I don’t think I even took my camera out of the bag the first few days. I was firmly in the throes of artist angst having fallen deeply into The Slough of Despond. I was Eeyore and dragging my bedraggled and waterlogged tail behind me. Pardon the mixed metaphors.

But then I started to see. There, look…..an interesting pattern. Some fetching texture. And once more camera is lifted to eye. Scene is composed. Shutter is snapped. Upon our return home I put my camera down and didn’t even bother to upload the images for well over a month….six weeks. Completely out of character for me.

When I finally did upload the images, I wasn’t overly excited by what I was seeing.

But as I stared at these bland, flat images an idea began to tickle at the back of my brainpan. I remembered Window Seat and all the lovely images that had been saved from mediocrity by Julieanne Kost’s deft hand with Adobe Photoshop.

Rather than Photoshop, I decided to toy with my images in Adobe Lightroom. When I don’t have a lot of time and want maximum bang for the buck, I usually start with ANYTHING Totally Rad. So, for all three of the images above, I did basically the same thing. I confined myself to the Totally Rad Lightroom Presets.

I started with The Basics and used the following ‘recipe’ – A Beginning/Strong, Auto/Shadows & Blacks, Highlight Hero/Medium and Sharpedo. I then did a bit of a vignette of around -50 or so. Here are the results.

Magical eh? Yeah, I thought so too. But as magical as they seem, Presets are really just a set of Lightroom adjustments that have been bundled together and can be implemented with a single click. It is actually quite easy to create your own Presets. I’ll save that for another post.

Check out these articles and reviews on other Totally Rad products:

Review: New Lightroom Presets From Totally Rad Really Deliver

Review: Totally Rad Lightroom Black & White Presets Produce Glorious Images

Review: New Totally Rad Lightroom ‘Effects’ Presets Add Visual Interest to Photographs

Review: Totally Rad Lightroom Presets Total Package

Totally Rad Photoshop Actions and Lightroom Presets

How to Elevate Your Snapshots With Adobe Lightroom Presets

The American West Through the Lens of a Point and Shoot

deborahwolfe — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:00:39 +0000

Or, How a Cheap Camera and a Thousand Dollars Worth of Software Can Work For You

My parents are retired, but not retiring. As a matter of fact, they’ve begun to range far and wide. Over this past summer, they set off on what I’ve begun to refer to as their Grand Adventure. They recently purchased a gigantic ‘Monster Bus’, a sort of land yacht RV thing, the type of thing you might see certain rock stars ensconced in. My mother had never seen the great American west or southwest and it had been decades since my father had. They set off on a 45 day ‘walk about’, following the setting sun.

My mother took a little point and shoot with her, to document their adventures. The images in this post were taken mostly by my mother, Patricia Sims. A few were taken by my father, Wayne Sims. My mother is an incredibly creative individual who has tried her hand successfully at a great many endeavors. Among other things, she has:

Built a beautiful field stone patio, single handedly
Learned to sew and applique’ beautiful garments
Taught herself to crochet and created lovely sweaters, afghans etc
Created incredibly intricate and unique art with decoupage
Created lovely art with gathered and dried lichens, bark, flowers, seed pods etc
Painted truly wonderful oil paintings of a great many subjects
Created the MOST fabulous outdoor courtyard with lush greenery and burbling fountain
Is a fabulous cook with an innate understanding of how to prepare wild game

Don’t tell anybody…..most especially her…..but I think my mother is an artist.

My mother has never taken a photography class, but has become a keen observer of what I do : ) I gotta say, she’s been a great ‘student’ and has a fantastic eye. She emailed all these images to me, just to share. They came directly out of her camera and were all rather ‘flat’. I couldn’t resist taking them into Lightroom and doing that voodoo that I do. Then I exported them to Photoshop and also ran some ‘actions’ on a few of them. Enjoy! This first one was taken through the moving RV window, hence the ‘grid’ effect.

My Daughter As Marie Antoinette

deborahwolfe — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:00:45 +0000

Or, How to Help Your Family Time Travel

My daughter just celebrated her September birthday and I wanted to give her something very special. She has a fascination with all things Marie Antoinette. I have a fascination with all things ART and thought it would be a good opportunity to continue working on my digital mastery and eventual conquest of the world. Not too mention I thought ‘J’ might enjoy BEING Marie Antoinette! How often DOES a young, modern woman get to see herself in French court attire?

The first step was research and selection of a suitable Marie Antoinette image. Fortunately, there is a wealth of visual imagery out there, produced directly from life, during Ms. Antoinette’s lifetime. After much searching and perusing, I finally settled on this one:

The next step was finding the best image of my daughter. Despite the fact I have been a professional photographer for a couple of decades AND have photographed my daughter ad nauseam, I did not have a current photograph that would work for what I had in mind. However, all was not lost. Digging though my files I came across a photo someone had taken of her with a cellphone.

Cellphone images are really low resolution, so I had to do a little rezzing up voodoo before I could isolate her face. After isolating her face, I flipped it horizontally and performed all manner of magic on it so it would match the painting when I dropped it in.

Then came the moment for the face transplant……drum roll please…..

At this point, I continued to refine the piece, using several different techniques, such as cloning, sampling colors, blending, opacity etc. I originally thought I might remove the glasses, then realized how much Marie Antoinette would have probably loved the sense of ‘decorum’ they provide.

I decided the final piece should be printed on canvas, to mimic the real deal. More decisions; should I just use the straight up image, or should I drop it onto another layer? I decided that the French court was NOT about restraint in…..anything. The more layers, ruffles, colors and lace, the better. So, I used a portion of another image I had on file, of a pink rose overlain with another color layer and some sort of interesting choice of blend modes.

That’s it for this week’s brain salad surgery.

Dangerous Beauty

deborahwolfe — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:00:21 +0000

“The world breaks everyone – and afterward some are strong at the broken places.”

Ernest Hemingway

Unexpressed love is toxic. Happy Birthday Kate.

Artist Indulgence

deborahwolfe — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:00:48 +0000

Or, A Few of My Favorite Things

Yeah, I know. EVERYBODY photographs flowers. Well, everybody also breathes, but you don’t see me insisting that fewer of you do it, now do you? I aim my camera at pretty things. Call me shallow, but not for me, all that journalistic ‘we really should do something about these terrible conditions’ kind of photography. It’s enough that it should be pretty. Make me feel good. Lift my spirits.

Like most artists and creatives, I have more work than will ever be seen. And like most artists, I WANT my work to be seen. I do it for me, but I also do it for the world. Really. These of some of my personal favorites.

The Oracle Consults Her Muse

deborahwolfe — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:00:36 +0000

Or, Another Step Closer to Figuring Some Crap Out

Or, Before Enlightenment, Chop Wood and Carry Water.

Or, After Enlightenment, Chop Wood and Carry Water.

This piece of artwork has kept me busy, on and off, for the better part of the past two months. I mentioned in an earlier post how much I love Maggie Taylor’s art. I’ve set about teaching myself an entire other way of doing/seeing/being. Oh dear. Hmmmm. I suppose I should also mention I have begun a new personal practice of The Dance of Shiva. Insights and breakthroughs could happen. Yeah, I know….better watch it with the airy-fairy stuff.

Anyway, like I was saying, I’ve been going in some new directions with photography and art. One of the things I love most about Maggie’s work is a certain ‘tactile’ sense it has. Admittedly, my piece is ‘slicker’ in feeling than Ms. Taylor’s work. I view this as a sort of self-imposed ‘class project’. I have to learn the techniques before I can really fly, so I worked with the tools at hand. My original inspiration for this piece was a photograph I took of my oldest daughter many years ago. At that time, I was basically doing a film and motion ‘test’ in the studio. The original photograph was shot on Agfa 1600 speed film, known for it’s fabulous graininess.

You may recognize the moon from my earlier piece. Look’it, artists and creatives revisit and reuse many of the same motifs over and over. Just like Joss Whedon uses a lot of the same actors and actresses in his movies and shows time and again. Or, how about how Tim Burton’s stuff all has a certain look and feel? You’re probably going to see that gramophone a few more times too. Anyway. Where was I? Talking about me…and one of my favorite things is angst. Not really, but it’s a good way to segue into a ‘detail’ shot of my latest masterpiece. Did I just say ‘masterpiece’?

That little rat is such a tiny part of the whole and all but imperceptible, yet I was compelled to work on it as much as if it was 20 feet tall…..’cause I’m sick like that.

I decided at the onset I didn’t want my ‘oracle’ to be a real person. Instead, I wanted her to be more of a mythical, fantastical creature. Therefore, head removal was required. In my layered file, I have a layer entitled ‘neck hole’. Yep. It doesn’t get more elegant than that, folks. Neck hole. Don’t make me have to rip off your head and spit down your neck hole! I’m here to single-handedly do away with the notion that artists live in their heads and don’t possess a powerful physicality. As a matter of fact, you can’t chop wood or carry water without a body.

Speaking of layers, my final image has 29 separate layers, and that doesn’t include the effects layers, such as drop shadows and outer glows. It is a MAMMOTH file, at 490 MegaBytes. I have learned SO much through the process of creating this piece. For example, blend modes. Yeah, just blend modes. I duplicated many of the layers and used different levels of opacity and blend modes to create different effects.

I harvested my oracle from iStock. I also have a portfolio of images with iStock that other people purchase and use. I wrote a post about earning passive income with micro stock photography a while back.

On a final note, aside from designing a bee tattoo for myself, I’ve been playing around with ways to incorporate a bee into my signature. Deborah is a Hebrew name from the Old Testament, meaning ‘the bee’. I am neither Jewish nor Christian, but I am……Deborah.

Sidewalks of Midtown – Atlanta – A Photographic Study

deborahwolfe — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:00:43 +0000

Or – Where the Werewolves of London Roam…Not

Unlike many major American cities, the city of Atlanta requires homeowners whose property abuts public streets to maintain the sidewalks between their property and the street. Rumor has it that other municipalities keep city sidewalks in good repair utilizing taxpayer’s money. In Atlanta, this rather non-progressive policy leads to a colorful variety of sidewalks in a full spectrum of repair and disrepair.

That said, the visual artist in me LOVES all the infinite variety of Midtown sidewalks.

Sometimes it is the sidewalk itself that is attractive, and other times it is the things I find on, in or by those sidewalks that wows me.

Digital Art – Blurring the Boundaries

deborahwolfe — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:00:32 +0000

Southern Gothic Gemini Watched Over by the Ancestors, the Moon and Mother Cameo

I LOVE Maggie Taylor’s art. I own one of her books and have been literally CONSUMING it. If I could eat it, I would. I feel so inspired when I look at her magical works of wonder. I’ve finally gotten patient enough to begin teaching myself an entire new art form. At this point, I am nowhere near the utter perfection of Maggie Taylor, but it is certainly a very high water mark to aim for.