I went cross country skiing today after lunch. What a treat to go off into the woods and just glide along through the exquisite snowy wonderland. There were a few other skiers out, like these two with their dog. I even saw a guy on the smaller trail on his mountain bike. The trail was firm enough that he was just leaving a slight track, so that's ok.
But most of the time it was just me and trees and the snow and here, the water.
And everyone looked so healthy with bright rosy cheeks. At first my finger tips got cold, but eventually my hands were nice and warm.
And toward the end, I got onto the bridge near the parking lot and looked down at the mostly frozen Campbell Creek.
The bridge does seem like a bit of overkill just to allow skiers, hikers, and bikers to cross the creek.
This also seems like a good opportunity to show what kinds of manipulation someone can do with Photoshop. The Computer Art and Design class (Art 257) I took at UAA this past semester had us using Photoshop a lot. One form of manipulation is changing the content of the picture - cutting out people you don't want in, adding others in, cleaning up the junk, etc. Obama's First Day in the Oval Office that I posted early is an example of extreme doctoring, though I left the style of most of the added pictures as they were so it would be clear that different people from different times were added into one picture. Though I did colorize Frederick Douglass and Jackie Robinson, and played with the color of some of the others. Journalistically, this is - or was - a big no-no.
Original undoctored picture
But what about the kind of manipulation I do below? I'm just using the built in filters in Photoshop and applying them to the same image. Well, it isn't quite that simple because for most of the filters you can move levers that make the effects more or less distinct. Is it ethical to doctor pictures this way? Make the sky more blue? The contrast better? I suspect that war is already lost. I even do it here - but those tend to be more pictures that don't have a political impact rather than 'news' pictures, and the differences is usually so minor it doesn't seem worth it to add a disclosure. But everything is political in that it affects how we see reality and thus how we act on what we see. So if my pictures prettify my subjects that affects how viewers perceive those subjects. And some of these obviously are not natural photos. So, take a look. Here's the original big, and then the variations of the same picture using different Photoshop filters.
Watercolor filter
Posteredges filter
Plasticwrap filter
Cutout filter
Playing with the Hue, Saturation, and Light
Solarize filter
I like all the pics, but I love the contrast in the posteredges filter. That is how I see things when I am in a bad mood-- everything has hard edges.
ReplyDeleteI think that I could replicate the cut-out edges filter picture with construction paper-- that is pretty cool and it doesn't look real.
The solarize filter is how oolong tea tastes to me-- I am probably weird but I see associate a lot of what I taste with visuals. I guess I like the last pic because I find it tasty. :)
I like how one picture has so many moods. When I was in high school a boyfriend showed me some pictures that he'd taken over the weekend. I pounced on it and expanded the idea and had kids skating under a bridge and people on horses going over the bridge, kind of reminiscent of Currier & Ives. He was a bit shocked to see this and said that some people's cup is either half full or half empty, but that I had an over flowing pitcher and the people who knew where he took the picture were smiling at me. He took me out to see where he'd taken the pictures and they were of a pair of culverts over a shoot-off from Rabbit Creek, and it couldn't have been more than 3" high, but he said he liked my version better!
I assume you know the word synesthesia..
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