Have you ever been at a place in your life where you felt you were standing on the edge of a great precipice of decision? You know that where you are is just run down and worn out and abandoned. It’s time to move to a new place…a different place. The door is before you and all the expanse of the unknown challenges and rewards that it holds, but to step off that familiar ground…the drop is so steep.

I guess that’s sort of how the baby bird feels when it’s time to leave his nest for his first flight. He sees other birds fly. He sees his parents fly and they tell him that he too, can fly now. Even his brothers and sisters have taken the leap. But what if it’s too soon for ME? What if I fly in the wrong direction? What if the wind carries me off course? What if? What if I don’t?

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”   ~Mark Twain

Easier said than done.

A few years ago, someone made a post on a blogging site about how exciting was the whole concept of RSS feeds. The general overview of that post presented it in such a way that it sounded easy and exciting so I downloaded a feed reader and prepared myself to be wowed. Trouble was, that generalized presentation of RSS feeds didn’t tell me how to USE the darn thing once I got it. I installed it in my browser, but WHERE IS IT? How do I USE it? I have over the years since, asked a couple of people successfully using RSS feeds how it worked but the way they tried to explain it was not clear to my befuddled brain. It seemed they had trouble with the whole concept that I actually NEEDED an explanation of something that to them, was absurdly simple. I came to the conclusion that I was simply too dumb to comprehend it, much less use it. I was unable to figure all this out in a matter of minutes, so as with most things that might require the reading of directions and some patience, I quickly became disinterested and moved on to things less challenging. The world of Internet content syndication went on without me, though I’ve continued to be secretly jealous that I could not a part of it.

Having recently successfully tackled the building of 2 websites and having effectively learned all manner of technical magic tricks that I was once convinced was well beyond my capabilities to absorb, I’ve gained some semblance of raw courage in tackling intimidating technology. So I revisited the whole idea of RSS feeds. In my own crawling of the Internet searching out information to add to my newly acquired genius, I’ve found countless websites that I’d LOVE to keep up with. I knew just enough about the concept of RSS feeds to understand that this is precisely what feeds are for. It’s like having your own regularly updated online “newspaper” if you will, containing all the newest content from your favorite websites that you have subscribed to, all collected in one list on one page. It has come to the point that I can no longer afford to cave under the pressure of my own impatience and dumbness. I simply MUST get a working knowledge of how to avail myself of the benefits of web syndication.

Enter my beloved Google. To me, Google is an Internet GOD, the Holy Father of the Internet Trinity, the Internet Ancient of Days. Google makes everything absurdly easy for the dumbest of the dumb.

So I revisited the pages I wanted to keep up with. I scoured each page for the feed “subscribe” button, then clicked it (almost EVERY website that knows even the slightest thing about what they are doing now has a “subscribe” button…if they don’t, shame on them). Here’s what they might look like:

When you click on most of these buttons, you are then given a choice of feed reader preferences, often presented in the form of various brightly colored buttons. Since Google is my own personal Internet Savior, I chose the Google feed reader button, which took me to a page that invited me to install the Google reader. If given the choice between subscribing to Posts or Replies, click either you would be interested in keeping up with. For me, I just usually stick to postings.

Then I go back to my favorite pages, hit the little orange button again, select the Google reader icon again. I’m taken now to my very own Google page containing my feeds. At the top of the page is a button to click that will add a ’subscription’ to the selected website’s updates to my Google feeds, which now show up in a little sidebar box on the left hand side of my page. I highlight the address of this feed page in my browser’s address bar, drag it to my browser’s menu bar and now I have only to hit a button at the top of my browser bar to go instantly to my feed page to see what’s new on all my favorite websites and blogs!  I can click on one of the feeds I have subscribed to and I get a page of titles to their latest updates. HOW COOL IS THIS?!@!@#$%^&&^%!!!!!!!?!

Now I can quickly and easily STAY well informed with timely information and entertainment from all my favorite sources. Once again, I have PROVEN the validity of the claim that you can INDEED successfully teach an old dog new tricks. Arf arf…I’ve earned a treat. CLICK HERE FOR FEED 101 and learn more about RSS feeds from Google, the Holy Father of all things Internet, and you TOO can learn a handy dandy new trick that will make you smart like me. Heh.

By the way, don’t you DARE leave here without hitting MY subscribe button. You know darn well your life will be greatly improved and so much more worth living with a steady stream of my nonsense delivered to your own personal feed page. My own ’subscribe’ button resides at the bottom right hand corner of every page. OR you can hit the link immediately following this post that invites you to “subscribe.” Just DO it.

Creative people generally need a lot of personal “space.” When others try to crowd them, cling to them, or put excessive emotional or material demands on them (whether these be real or perceived), their strongest inclination is to rebel…even bolt and run. They simply MUST have the freedom to be who they are, to explore, to meditate, to ruminate, to experiment and to change…CONTINUALLY. Friends and family members who do not share the same creative tendencies often take offense at these peculiar needs of creative people. They may feel that the creative person does not like them, doesn’t love them or appreciate them when they are pushed away or avoided. They take such things personally and begin to experience feelings of rejection, when truly it is not rejection at all. It is simply a misunderstanding between what 2 distinctly different people need from one another, and what each is equipped to give. This could explain why many creative people seem to have much difficulty maintaining intimate relationships, particularly with others who do not share their own creative tendencies.

Are YOU in relationship with a creative person? Your poor soul. Good luck with that. We can’t change. And if we could, you wouldn’t really want us to. Just pray for grace.

So I’ve built a Sitemap page that gives visitors (and web crawlers and spiders) quick and easy access to all my content. I’ve submitted it to search engines, tweaked and uploaded a robots file to my root directory and other similar puttering around with SEO stuff. Truth is, I’m not quite sure what the heck I’m doing, or if I’m doing it right or wrong. I’m not so sure it is particularly wise to be posting this confession on the worldwide web either…especially now that I have all this technology in place to actually DIRECT everyone TO this confession…or DO I? But I am.

If you know even less about all this stuff I’m talking about than I do, I bet I STILL sound smart. Heh. If I keep my own practice of “crawling” the web for tidbits of information that may improve my own web-savvy and keep experimenting with stuff I’m learning (or THINK I’m learning), I’m BOUND to ACTUALLY learn something sooner or later. Or not. But I will most certainly SOUND as though I’ve learned something. And afterall, appearances are everything…

Problems with this image are numerous, the most glaring being the white balance, soft focus and lack of detail in too-dark shadows. Fortunately it was a Camera RAW file and there were no large areas of blown out highlights so I thought it might be a good candidate for my first experiment in improving an inferior shot with HDR and tone mapping. This is the original RAW image as it came out of the camera:

Step 1
I dragged the file’s icon into Photoshop, which opened the camera RAW conversion dialog. I adjusted the white balance, manually dragging the slider towards the cooler range of hues to get rid of the overwhelming yellow color cast. I then opened a COPY of the file. I repeated the process again with the same original raw file–removing the color cast with the same settings as the previous file, but this time, I also adjusted the exposure levels by raising them about 2 stops. Opened a copy of THIS file, which was automatically opened with a suffix of −2. I repeated the process twice more–one shot opened with exposure altered by lowering about 2 stops, and the other with some slight lightening of the shadow areas while still in the raw state. This gave me 4 copies of this photo, each at a different exposure level.

Steps 2-3
I saved all 4 exposures, opened them in Photomatrix and created an HDR file, which was then saved before any further alterations. Next I tone mapped the HDR image by adjusting the controls in the tone mapping Detail Enhancer tab. This is my result:

I can’t complain about the detail, but to me it just looks flat and uninteresting. Why I added some sharpening to this I can’t say, as it just made the foreground too light and the scene lost even more depth. Nor did it have that dreamy feel I had experienced when I first came upon this scene.

Step 4
I reopened and saved the original raw file with the color cast corrected. Then duplicated the layer and brought out some detail in the shadows by adjusting levels and curves. This made the rest of the picture too light so I erased the top portion of the lighter layer so that the only real change I saw was in the lighter foreground. Then I merged the adjusted layers into one. Without Photomatrix’s tone mapping, my beam of sunlight through the trees was preserved.

Steps 5–Orton Effect
I took the composite file I just created and applied the Orton effect. I duplicated the background layer and changed the Blend Mode to Screen and named the layer ‘Sharp.’ Then created another background copy just under it before I merged it down to the new background layer I just created. Next I created another background layer and named it Blur. I applied a Gaussian Blur at a strength of about 20 and changed the Blend Mode to Multiply.

This gave me the dream-like effect I’d been looking for, but I still wanted more contrast and color saturation, so I trashed the 2 layers I’d just created and started over. I made a copy of the background layer and changed the Blend Mode to Overlay, then lowered the opacity until I got the saturation and contrast I wanted. Then I merged this layer down to the last background layer I had created, then repeated the above process with this newer layer.

Finishing Touches
Much closer to what I felt I was looking for, I still felt the foreground was too saturated and the tree trunk in the foreground too dark. I selected the tree trunk from one of my earlier tone mapped files, pasted it over the existing tree trunk and did some selective erasing back to the layer beneath until I got the detail I wanted. I also did some erasing on the layer beneath on the background scenery to give a little more contrast between the foreground tree trunk and the background. And now…I’m now happy! THIS is what I saw (and EXPERIENCED) when I first saw this scene…

(I’ll eventually get this whole thumbnail thing figured out for this theme, but until then, for a larger view of this image, click on the preview on the home page.)

I’ve never been a creative purist. In life, perhaps HOW you get to a place is as–if not MORE–important than where you get to. Imagery however, is an altogether different story. I’m all about pushing all the envelopes with any basic image, no matter how good the original. And since it is safe to say I was really an ARTIST long before I was a PHOTOGRAPHER, I have a very strong bent toward more painterly renderings and effects. Enter HDR imaging.

Being too lazy to compose a brief but relatively clear definition of HDR in my OWN words, here’s the short of it in an excerpt from an article from naturescapes.net/:

“Dynamic range (DR) is the range of luminance values from the darkest to the lightest. Our eyes can perceive a subset of the scene’s DR (about 10,000:1), while your camera can record a smaller subset than your eyes can see – perhaps 400:1 for a DSLR. The DR of a monitor or a printed photograph is smaller yet.

High dynamic range (HDR) in photography means representing the full range of tonality present in the scene. Most HDR techniques use software to combine several different exposures into a single file that maps the full range of luminance at every pixel. The HDR image is then processed through tone mapping (adjusting the tonal values) the HDR image into a 16-bit or 8-bit digital file such as a JPEG or TIFF image.”

Now, on to my own invaluable mutterings on the subject. Though this technique has actually been around for a while now, it seems much more popular and widely used now, as it has become more readily accessible through reasonably priced software such as Photomatrix (which creates your HDR files and has extensive controls for customized tonemapping) and filters such as Topaz Adjust which renders similar effects. There are actually a number of various methods of creating an HDR, even a “fake” HDR, and tonemapped effect, in even the most affordable entry level software programs such as Photoshop Elements. (A “fake” HDR is a file that has been created from just one exposure, saved several times at different exposure levels as changed in your image editing software.)

Visit virtually any photo hosting site and you will find HDR tonemapped images…many of which will be on the front page of contest winners. This rendering technique is considered by many to be something of a mixed medium photographic art because of the extensive digital processing involved to produce the final image. Many people love the effect when done properly…some don’t. Each to his own. It’s probably not difficult to figure out which category I would all in.

As with ANY recipe, the quality of your final masterpiece is contingent upon the quality of the ingredients that go into its creation. It doesn’t take long to see that HDR imaging is no different. Though it is possible to take a mediocre or even somewhat POOR image and improve it tremendously with various editing methods and filters, the HDR tonemapped images that win the contests and elicit gasps of awe from viewers are undoubtedly the ones created from a minimum of 3 bracketed exposures, one being a near PERFECT exposure.

Since I have far more inferior quality shots than really GOOD shots (there is a rumor that this is true even of professional photographers, though I’m not sure I believe it), my first experiments in toying with this technique are with trying to salvage whatever I can from some of my favorite subject matter in these personal collections of inferior photos. I started with an image I shot while on an outing last fall. Most of my shots from that day were pretty sorry, as I was so excited about the breathtaking views everywhere we went that day that I was having great difficulty ‘focusing’ (no pun intended) on exposures and camera settings and all those details that photographers need to pay attention to but that artists hate to fool with. This shot was no exception…here is the original RAW file, straight out of the camera:

One could compose an entire photography class on everything that’s wrong with this photo–the white balance is wrong and the focus is way too soft to mention just a couple of the most obvious. Yet I still saw potential here and really wanted to reproduce an image that accurately portrayed how I originally viewed that scene. It almost felt surreal–the little bridge over the creek leading into the woods with sunlight streaming through the brightly colored autumn leaves…so much so it gave me goosebumps and made me gasp in awe. Though sadly, as is so often the case with my pictures, once I got home and downloaded the shot, I was painfully disappointed. Not to be daunted however, I knew that someday, somehow, I would figure out how to salvage this very special moment.

The final image is a product of using virtually every tool in my tricks box–camera RAW adjustments, Photomatrix’s HDR and tonemapping, Photoshop’s blending and layering, not to mention a myriad of tweeks in curves and levels, opacity adjustments and selective erasing. I FINALLY hit that sweet spot. I now feel that my final image is a very accurate representation of what I saw, not only with my EYES that morning, but with my SOUL–which is afterall, our keenest source of vision.

Fully illustrated details of the murky journey from the pitiful original to the final glory will follow in an upcoming post. For now, I must tear myself away from my passion and get back to the daily attendance of the needful things that comprise everyday life in a carnal existence. Pleh.

This is an old antique tractor that sits on display in a neighbor’s field. The background of the original setting was not horrible, but neither was it very interesting. So I start plundering through my collection for some background images that needed a little something extra to make THEM more interesting.

An old shot of another neighbor’s donkeys seemed a PERFECT fit for this old tractor. I had actually put the tractor on 3 other backgrounds too…all of which I like, and may post later…this one just turned out to be my favorite. It’s almost as if the donkeys are checking out the tractor as the “new guy” in the field…”So he thinks he’s a hot shot…sitting over there with his big rubber tires and loud motor…PFFT.”

Horsepower vs. tractor power…who will win? Perhaps they can learn to live peaceably together.

This is actually a merging of 2 separate shots taken about 3 years apart. Both shots were relatively uninteresting in and of themselves, but together? They were made for each other. Ain’t Photoshop GRAND?!