A Boy with his Head in the Clouds #2 was one of two of my iPhonographic images featured in the "Diverging Mediums: Photography vs. iPhoneography" show held at the Torpedo Factory's Target Gallery in Alexandria, VA May 10th through May 31st, 2012.
A Boy with his Head in the Clouds #2
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One of my recent series of images started with the one I call "Dune". It all started when I was waiting for my wife to finish "doing some business" after we dropped off our rental car at the Ft. Lauderdale airport recently. I was waiting with our luggage standing next to a wall that was not your typical wall. The odd thing was, that I didn't notice the wall right away. After about 5 minutes, I turned and, it hit me! This was a wall that could definitely have potential. So, as any self-respecting iPhoneographer would do, I whipped out my phone and snapped a few images. The original that I picked is the one shown on top above.
Image #1: "Dune"
I started by taking 2 slightly different shots of the wall and running them through AutoStitch (a similar effect could have been done in Blender as in image #2). This gave me an image with a slight double exposure look because the 2 images didn't quite line up. I then rotated it 90°, tweaked it a bit in BlurFX, and ran it through the "dual-gradient" filter in Photo fx Ultra. After playing around with a bunch of other ideas, I decided that this one (#1 above) was pretty nice all by itself.
Image #2: "Red Vortex"
This was done by taking image #1 and running it through Tiny Planets. It was then "blended" in Blender by using 2 of the same images, but enlarging and twisting the top image a few degrees prior to doing a basic 50% normal blend. Color was adjusted via Photo fx Ultra.
Image #3: "When Dunes Collide"
This was simply done by taking image #1 and dropping it into Diptic (twice). The resulting 2 images were flipped & adjusted to get the image you see above. I thought about blending an image of a face with this one, but wasn't satisfied with any attempts, so I bagged that idea (for the time being).
Image #4: "What do you see when you look into my Eyes"
This one was also done in Diptic by repeating the image from #3 4-times. This one came out with an even more prevalent "suggestion" of a face, so I went back to the idea of blending an actual face below the abstraction. I found an image of yours truely at the age of about 5, blew it up (using Blender) until the eyes matched the right spots, and the result is #4 above.
A while ago, I created a Facebook post about a shot I took at the local WalMart, so I thought since I now have an official blog, I'd repost it here.
I thought it would be enlightening to retrace my steps on the progression of images that came out of one particulary interesting shot, so I compiled a Diptic shot that encompasses the main tangents from the original shot.
Image #1 - The initial shot was of some empty outdoor shelving at the local Wal-Mart. The image shown was Autostiched from several original Camera+ shots. It was also run through a couple of Iris filters, like color sketch and Retro.
Image #2 - This is a Tiny Planet version that was "fixed" by taking a section from the "tiny tube" version to fill in a blank area in the "tiny planet" version. This was done via Juxtapoaser. Seen in the full-sized version, this shot is pretty nice by itself.
Images #'s 3, 4 and 5 - These are largely Decim8 versions of #2, although, I usually add components from other shots (usually via Superimpose) to fill in dead areas.
Image #6 - This is a Diptic compilation of shots #4, and 5 which was then blended (with Blender) with an old high school picture of yours truely.
Image #7 - This is a Decim8 shot that I thought had potential by itself. I wound up cropping the bottom section off about a third of the way up. I then created a white rectangle in ArtStudio, which I then brought into Photo fx Ultra to apply a gray gradient from the top to midway down. This was then positioned over the bottom section of the main shot via Superimpose (with some transparency applied) to give it more of a reflective look. This shot also has merit on it's own (in my humble opinion).
Image #8 - Here we have shot #7 along with some ballerinas I "borrowed" by taking a Hipstamatic shot of the cover of the latest J. Crew catalogue (I'd give credit to the photographer, but it isn't listed anywhere in the catalogue). A "stamp" was created in Juxtaposer from the cut-out of the ballerinas and used to create a line of dancers long enough to span the image (alas, these are not all twins). Some basic shadows were added in PhotoForge1. The final treatment was with ScratchCam, and I also cropped the bottom a bit more.
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