Just another image...

Originally an oil on canvas painting, then photographed and scanned and 'shopped until...

An index of sorts

• My art gallery (of sorts!) contains a mix of oils, ink, texta and carpet cleaner
• If you like this sort of thing, my aviation pics blog is here
  
• More specifically my aviation gallery is here
• Even more specifically my airliner art is here
• My floral pics are in this gallery
• And also here, but with extra added animals as well
• And I have an automobile gallery - Austins to Volkswagens via Alfas
  

You'll find lots of images if you poke around on those sites - some are scanned from negatives or prints, or photographed digitally - and some will be 'Photoshopped to death'. I offer no apologies for this, it's merely an extension of the weird and wonderful world of darkroom developing and printing that I entered a long, long time ago!

Photoshopping for dummies like me

I don't know about you but I mostly learn software by trying it. The best tactic of all, I find, is to set myself a mission and attempt to figure out how to do it by any means possible. Mostly that means trying lots of things and occasionally - in desperation only - reading help files or web sites that I stumble over.

These bicycle pics illustrate that taking a fairly ordinary item and choosing to frame it just so and then to crop and alter it for impact can result in some interesting images. These were all 35mm film shots, mostly from the 1980s, using a Pentax K2 SLR and Ektachrome.

This gallery also takes some mundane but interesting (to me, anyway) pics from the 1970s and Photoshops them to death, until they are almost unrecognizable. (You could use any similar program, such as the GIMP, of course.)Well I like 'em anyway. They demonstrate the use of filters, mostly, and give you a hint of how trial and error can take you places.

For example I go from here... to here... and end up... there.
I've adjusted contrast and brightness, used a few fave filters like dry brush, cutout and plastic wrap and bingo!




And I go from here to there! And so on. It's infinite, really. I end up with a few new skills, some ideas and a new batch of images I didn't have before. Some of them will get reused in various ways, and the insight I gained in making them will be used again on other images. And I had fun as well.

And when I have fun there's no stopping me. There are many more examples of what can happen when you go crazy with filters, layers and contrast... and someof them are absolute rubbish. But gee I've learned something, anyway ;-)

Mostly digital?

Well all digital, really. By the time it gets to the wonderful of world wide web it's all gone digital. But I mean to say that I spend a few years - maybe 20 or so - in a purely analog world. In fact I started with a Kodak Box Brownie using (I think this is right, it was the 1960s!) 120 format film. The type that winds onto a spool. Yeah, real old stuff. By the 1970s I'd progressed from Kodak Instamatics to Pentax K series 35mm cameras, via an Olympus Trip 35. The Olympus was where I learned to spend hours in a darkroom, firstly with D76, fixer and lots of rinsing, later with Cibachrome and all the rest. I rolled my own film, shot on both Ektachrome and Tri and Plus-X, and developed it all myself (where allowed by Kodak, anyway - they had ways to make you use their services!). I also got into Polaroids via the SX70, 8mm film, medium format and you-name-it. I managed to take some photos as well as do all of the hardware stuff.

And then I bought a computer in '84. And another in '85. And a scanner in about 1988. And after that I went digital, gradually, by degree, until I end up here on the web with a Nikon dSLR, several scanners and boxes of old negatives. There you go, that's the history lesson over!

My main gallery is here... feel free to browse. It's rather varied but very safe viewing.

OK, so some more digital tampering, is it?

Photoshop, or its open source alternative the GIMP, is a wonderful thing to play with... filters, brushes, layers, cropping, burn-in and so on - and on. It sure saves a lot of darkroom time, or so you would think. I do find myself just tinkering so much more and going a lot further to get exactly what I want. And finding that I want 30 versions of one image. Oh well.