Monday, February 13, 2006

ok first point done, my room is now a little bit cleaner, so I thougt lets give photoshop another try. And I have to admit the magic ward tool, is just great. It selected the areas of the different pictures exacly in the way there where supposed to be.

My originally idea to the pictures was to take the plane from the blue sky and put it into a sunset. Afterwards I added some trees and more clouds. I surrounded the plane with a nice blurry shadow to hide the cutting corners and to emulate movement. I also pasted a house in the left corner. And blurred everything, except for the plane, couple of time until it looks nice. To give it a drastic look, we converted it to black and white and played a little bit with the insensity channels.

It was a breeze, tomorrow I will try something similar with gimp. And the working speed of photoshop is great, except for the raw file handling what takes forever and a day.

it's a damn cold night...

actually not I just got home from dinner with my girlfriend and where supposed to clean my room, pack some stuff doing my taxes and go to bed, but after I started to clean up, I got so bored that I was reading a little bit at a website about the method: convert color to alpha. Sounds interessting. So I took some pictures, converted them to black and white to get some similaritys.
The result of 45 minutes of playing you can see to the left.

Now I could go back to the important stuff, but no I had to read another website about taking pictures and night time... this was even more boring. But I got some really nice results and the only reason that I stopped doing this, was that my cam run out of power, time to buy a spare batterey for 30$ for the next time. ( I only made 6 shots in the bulb mode with a totally senseless noise reduction afterwards. The exposure was arround 10 minutes each shot at iso 200 and F-Stop 11).

The other pitty was, whenever I tried to make a pictures of, say many stars at once. I was stopped by my cam: sorry you need an ultrawide lens for this kind of pictures. Now is the problem, there are only 4 lenses for this on the market (to get an ultrawide range with a nikon) and they are all arround 500$, or even worst the nikon brand (recommended, if you ever want to update to another nikon D-series) at 900$. Ok I could live with 350$, 500$ are way to much (out of the toy range.) and 900$ is insane.

The last 2 problems with pictures at night are, It is cold, so I finally have a reason to buy some new shoes (yes even I consider to wear something what's not called flip lops ) and even worse.: Why are stars and leaves moving. Please how is it possible to have a nice sharp picture at night, which needs a long time exposure, of say several minutes. And the wind moves the leaves and the stars are also moving somehow (or the earth was moving)