Recent So-So Photography

Here's a mourning dove I caught in flight, but an awful bland flat blue and backlit. I grayscaled it, up'd the Brightness/Contrast and then layered in some color and clouds.

The Golden Compass - Movie

I googled The Golden Compass back in Dec07, but had forgotten all the controversy about it.

It was on free HBO, so I recorded it and watched it later.
(The only other thing worth mentioning on HBO was Jumper which was worth a watch. Maybe the book by Steven Gould would be better?)

I thought The Golden Compass was a good fantasy adventure.
The movie is rated PG13 and the books are teen section, so not for the very young, I suppose.

I loved the bear (Iorek).
I don't think Lyra ever rode him with his armor on as the poster ads show.

The movie was stripped of the antigod/antireligious aspects that were in the books, evidently.
I didn't think the movie was religious.
It was fantasy.
I thought the daemon stuff was weird/odd.
The dust idea was interesting and I probably liked that the best of all ideas in the movie.

From googling the topic now, it doesn't sound like there will be a movie sequel, which is disappointing because The Golden Compass ended abruptly with things still unfinished.

I might checkout/read the books, just so I can find out for myself what the story says about the whole god/religion thing.

His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman is made up of three books:
1. Northern Lights (The Golden Compass)
2. The Subtle Knife
3. The Amber Spy Glass

I think the author is coming out with a new book that explores the dust idea further.
It's called "The Book of Dust."

Trivia:
Daniel Craig ( James Bond in Quantum of Solace 2008) is Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass 2007.
And Eva Green (Vesper Lynd in Quantum of Solace) is Serafina Pekkala in The Golden Compass.

LINKS:

There is a His Dark Materials Fansite Discussion Forum,
and an
Interesting Article
via
Ebert.

Lots at YouTube,
Some currently available:
Trailer
Defining Daemons
Intro (daemons, dust, compass, etc.)
Iorek Intro (bear)

Grand Canyon - Movie

So far, I've recorded lots and watched only one movie on free HBO, Grand Canyon (1991).
It's an older movie I've seen before but forgotten and I just caught it channel surfing, so didn't record it. Should have.
I liked the philosophical slant to the movie and I liked the humor.
It's a movie I'd watch again and so I'd buy the DVD if I ever found it locally or Amazon has it for $10.00.

My favorite quote in the movie is when Simon is talking about his father.
Also I got a kick out of Dee, she was soooooo melodramatic and intense, it made me laugh.
I'm not sure if the character was meant to be funny in that way, it just struck me that way at the time I was watching it.

Fav Quote:
Found at
script-o-rama.com
(Not sure of accuracy, and I'm editing, but the punch line is there.)

SIMON:
My father died last year. He was 80 years old.
It's a long time for a black man to live in this town.
He outlived everyone he ever knew.
He saw two wives die and three of his children.
He had a great ugly old face that looked like a suitcase gone a million miles...
...all beat up and dented and scuffed and stained.
Man, he looked like
he walked years on that face.
When I used to look at that face and see all the pain there...
...all the things he'd lost, all the hurt he had...
...I wondered why he wanted to go on,
why he just didn't lay down and give it up.

MACK: Did you figure it out?
SIMON: No. Never figured out much about that guy. I asked him, though.
MACK: What'd he say?
SIMON: Habit.

More Filter Forge Favorites

6322 Background Backdrop
with
3542 Crayon

(Nice texture)

BG Bkdrop again
with
5321 Atmosphere
(Bokeh)




427 Caustic
Layering, blending in PSP.
Not sure what these were meant to be used for, but I found them interesting to play with in Paint Shop Pro.



Hotel Art

Sexy!


(Purple one is embossed, both framed, in Paint Shop Pro.)
It sounded like the creator kinda made a joke out of this "hotel art," but I happen to like it.
And it would be a good start to a digital landscape painting.

Add
Pencil Sketch
to the Hotel Art.
I like the pencil sketch effect on the hotel art.
I'm not sure how well it works on photos.

High Drama Sunrise

High drama sunrise this morning.
I had difficulty getting the color balance correct.
The colors were definitely dusty blue and dusty pink.
This pic is as close as I could get, color correction post processing.
I never get tired of cloud photos. Endless variety.

Filter Forge

I've been preoccupied with trying out Filter Forge plugin creator.
Hours and hours of entertainment.

I'm posting new blog template images all made with that program.



Features of note:
Make your own filters.
Random button and presets.
Seamless feature.
Reminds me of Inkscape effects generator, only more advanced and more user friendly.
Can download filters and samples at site.
I like that they are numbered with an html link inside the software program.
Every element has a submenu, which is not readily apparent at first glance.

See wiki for info on plugin creators.
Interesting to see the history on it. Filter Forge info and links there.

Filter Forge links to filters I used for my blog template images.
3494 Moody Shadows
7114 Retro Pattern
6742 Yin Yang (Site says removed?)
6249 Singularity

Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice - Music

Okay, let's not get too serious here.
How about some dancing music.

Weapon of Choice
Fatboy Slim (aka Quentin Leo Cook, aka Norman Cook)

(Still going thru my music by title using Windows Media Player, whew.)

Currently, I found three different videos at youtube with this song:
1. Christopher Walken
2. street scenes
3. girls
OR
google it.

More Links:
songmeanings
wiki
dailymotion video has info about the song.
The song draws from Frank Herbert's novel Dune, evidently.

Connie Converse Story - Music

I found out about Connie Converse via the NPR Song of The Day, here.
(Follow the links there.)

Something about it hooked me.
A singer/songwriter in the 1950's who went largely unrecognized.
She packed up her bags in 1974 and disappeared.
If alive today, she'd be 85 years old.
Converse's Social Security number has not been registered as a death.

Hour long mp3 download about Connie, here.
(Follow the links there, also.)

"One has a right to become a missing person."
(51:50 on mp3)



Image creation notes:
Coloring and grain is aged film effect, white faded/ragged borders.
Feedback effect on linear gradient, greyscale, increase brightness/contrast for "road."

Radial Blur and Landrollers

I caught some Dog Whisperer episodes on the National Geographic Channel and wondered what kind of skates Cesar Millan wore.

They are Landrollers. Noticed the pic at the Landroller site and tried to duplicate the effect in Paint Shop Pro using radial blur zoom and masking. Turned out pretty good. (Found the original googling.) The Landroller website added the helmet too, evidently.

Duplicate layer the original image, radial blur zoom, then added a mask and airbrushed out the areas I wanted in focus.

Airbrush settings need to be very soft so edges won't show.


Layer Palette.


Can duplicate the entire mask layers group and fiddle with layer opacity and blend modes for various lighting and contrast effects.

Moon And Venus

Moon and Venus in the eastern sky at 6:24 a.m.

Post-processing: added a dash of cloud texture, lightened the blue tones a tad, removed the chromatic aberration on Venus, sharpened, added border, cropped of course.

Moon to Hide Venus
Sometime before or after sunrise Wednesday, April 22.

Geese

Things are still lookin' pretty brown and soggy around here.

The most interesting thing I saw this past weekend were Mr. and Mrs. Goose hanging out along the rec trail. (I guess they're a couple, I couldn't tell. heh heh)



What's with the leg, I have no idea.

Okay, that's enough of this photo shoot, we're outa here.



The water looked muddy dirty that day and a fairly blue sky too.

Besides cropping, I added some fill flash to the foot pic post-processing. No sharpening. I liked them soft better.

These were all taken with my Canon XSi. I usually take BOTH cameras, the Canon S3 and XSi. The viewer is WAY better on the XSi in sunlight. Better quality goose feathers from the XSi. S3 is better at handheld great DOF--everything in focus and sharp. Typical point and shoot vs DSLR behavior, I guess. I'll probably always have BOTH types of cameras.

My next camera equipment purchase is probably going to be a
50mm f/1.4 lens for my XSi. I want to get creative with shallow DOF and learn how to work with such a thing.

Better build quality, better bokeh (background blur), better focusing than the cheapy 50mm f/1.8 lens.

After that purchase? Probably a shoe-mount flash.

NOTE:
Canada Geese.
"Canadian Geese" is incorrect, evidently.

Previous pics:
here
and
here

NOTE2:
Standing on one leg is typical resting posture of (some/all?) birds, evidently.
Golden's Birds of North America 1983 Ed., now 2001 Ed.
Page 108 Behaviour of Shorebirds:

9. Dunlin standing on one foot, a typical resting posture of shorebirds.

Awesome Bokeh in Paint Shop Pro

Idea from the popular "awesome" bokeh photoshop tut here.

Here's mine:



Probably needs more work, but I thought it looked pretty good as is.

How I did it:

I made a couple of brush stamps using the circle shape that looked like this:





For the settings and variance, I started with the stock PSP8 brush Preset called Confetti and then tweaked it until I got the effect I wanted.

Brush Step was between 60-80.
Brush Variance (F11) - I ended up with everything at zero EXCEPT:
Size Jitter = 10
Fade Rate = 100
Position Jitter = 100
Impressions per step = 1



Brush with White FG and Pale Grey BG.
Two layers for depth.
One with smaller brush size and blurred.
Both layers set to Overlay blend mode. (I tried Dodge, but the brush borders get jaggie.)

Gradient used was a multicolored linear with gaussian blur 40 added.



To get more light/shading variance I airbrushed random white spots on a top layer.
Use very light settings: Size 50, Hardness 2, Opacity 10, Step 10
Then added some Gaussian blur and set layer blend mode to Dodge.

My layer palette looks like this:


And in addition, a happy accident along the way:



The dark blue background layer with one layer of that gradient set to blend mode dodge resulted in the above image.

I've made those before using filters/plugins. Never knew how to make one from scratch. I'll have to play with that some more.

Popular Photoshop Lines Tut with a Filter

This Photoshop Lines Tutorial shows up on a lot of recommended tut lists for some reason.

Playing around with filters/plugins, I found one that does something similar.



Birgits Chaos Filters
Black&WhiteStripes
Use as Overlay Layer on top of a gradient.
Flip, Mirror, Rotate, etc the layers.
Try different gradients.
Try different Black&WhiteStrips Settings.
Add a black layer and then crop off the sides of the stripes to look more like the Photoshop tut.
Stretch, rotate with the Deform tool.
Endless variety.



An Offset filter, included in Paint Shop Pro and many other graphics software programs, will make stripes from any image.
Simple, Diamonds plugin/filter will rotate vertical stripes 45 degree angle and fill the image seamlessly.

More ideas here.
Has a link to the Birgits and Simple filters.

Kang Filters

These images were created using the Kang 4 Filter set.

I really like them.
Just pretty abstracts.

GIMP

I got the bug to install GIMP and see what it's like, even though I don't really need another graphics program. Paint Shop Pro is dying since Corel bought it from Jasc, so I'm unsure about it's future.

Is it gimp or GIMP? GIMP, I think.

The first thing about GIMP I wanted to know was how well it supported the use of free Photoshop compatible (*.8bf) plugins/filters.

"Pspi is a GIMP plug-in that runs 3rd-party Photoshop plug-in filters."

For Windows, download gimp-pspi-1.0.7.win32.zip
and unzip. There is only one file in it, pspi.exe.

Copy and paste it in GIMP's plug-in directory here:
C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins

Load GIMP and under the Filters Menu there will be an added option called:
"Photoshop plugin settings"
Click on that and select a path for the plugin (s) you want to load.
I then had to exit GIMP and reload it before it would look for and load those plugins.
I got a popup error on Paint Engine plugin.
It would not work in GIMP. (Possibly because of that ini file?)
Look under the Filters Menu in GIMP again and the plugins should be listed there.

Most plugins I tried worked okay in GIMP.
IrfanView might have better support for 8bf plugins, so that's an option. Paint Engine works in IrfanView.

Since I had just recently been on a fractal kick, I noticed right away that GIMP offered some fractal effects. Fractal Explorer is listed under Filters, Render Menu. More Fractals under Filters, Render, Nature Menu. But those looked too rudimentary and not user friendly. Apophysis would definitely be better.

There's that initial struggle to get around a new interface, but GIMP is pretty easy to learn. Windows behavior support is poor--typical of Open Source software, though, so no surprise. What is up with that multiple popups thing when saving jpg files? Drove me crazy. I need to find out how to make that go away.

I looked in the Filters area first for things that might be in GIMP but not in PSP.
Some interesting effects I want to play with more are:
Filters, Artistic, Cubism
Filters, Artistic, GIMPressionist (Might be like PSP brushstrokes?)
Filters, Distort, Lens Distortion (has a zoom and different from PSP)
Filters, Light and Shadow, Supernova
Filters, Light and Shadow, Lighting Effects (different from PSP)



Paint Shop Pro 9 has a LOT more features than GIMP.
I would definitely miss it.

I've fiddled with Photoshop, but don't like it much.
Photoshop does have some nice filters/effects, though.

More Art

Been quietly playing in Paint Shop Pro a lot lately. I have lots of images I've created that I like but not much to say to go along with them. I basically just start with some kind of fill like a gradient or stock pattern and then start applying different effects/plugins/filters to it and go from there. Sometimes I see something online that gives me an idea for an image, but often end up with something else completely different.

I adore red and green color combos...



This one is fun and lively.



Applying filters/plugins will often result in ragged edges, spots, pixelation that I want to smooth or remove, so I use various blurs to do that. I forget about Edge Preserving Smooth effect in Paint Shop Pro. I think it might be close to Photoshop's Noise Reducer. I'm wanting something that smoothes cleans without making things looks too blurry like Gaussian blur will do. Median blur can go too far and lose definition. Anyway, it's interesting and fun to use various blurs and see what happens. Radial blur is a fav, very versatile in Paint Shop Pro with twirl, swirl, zoom and more. And then sometimes I use the warp brush if I want to mush, move for a more random, imperfect look.

Here's what my PSP Help files say about Edge Preserving Smooth:



And Radial Blur...





Gradient-like effects are always fun, no blurs on this one...



All images created had a filter applied from the VisMan package.

The Richest Season - BOOK

Here's a good weekend read.

The Richest Season,
By Maryann McFadden

I enjoy starting over stories.
This one was different because it tells the story from both sides. I liked Paul's transformation story more than Joanna's.
The turtles side story wasn't interesting to me at all.
I hesitated about reading the book because of the dying stuff (Grace's story), but it didn't get too heavy/melodramatic.

A debut novel.
The author has a 2nd book coming out Jul 09.

Reading The Wind - BOOK

I read something different, a sci-fi book.

Reading The Wind, by Brenda Cooper

Summary/Review

See also Brenda's blog post series on the ideas explored in the book.

I discovered it the old-fashioned way--at the library.
The title caught my eye.
Good storytelling in that it moved along at a good pace and kept me interested.
The wind readers interested me the most in the story and I wanted more details on that. Or rather, where that idea comes from and if there are other books that explore a similar idea.
When I got to the part where the enemy landed, I couldn't stop reading it until I was finished.
This book is part 2 of 4.
Part 3 and 4 are not published yet.
I'm not feeling like I want to go back and read part 1, but I might read what comes next after part 2.

I've been playing around in Paint Shop Pro lately. Here's something I just created that seemed to go along with this book theme.



Image Creation Notes:
Visual Manipulations (VisMan or VM Natural),
Instant Art, Strange Life Form 2
Applied to a gradient.
Added various blurs.

Blender Dice

So this is the nicest thing I've created in Blender so far. (Working thru Hirsig's Blender 3D Tuts.)



An animated Rubik's cube would be fun to make someday.

NOTES:

Again, the MyBlender.blend file mentioned in the tut is from Unit #3.

I liked how the spheres/dots were moved to a different layer so they were out of the way.

Here's the front perspective view (wireframe) once all the spheres are created and in position. It shows how cluttered the view can get when working with a lot of objects.



I liked the reminders to use different views to make sure the objects are in correct position. That is something to get used to when working in 3D.

I had to attempt the Join command (Ctrl/J) 3 or 4 times before I got it to work. "Join" shows up in the Undo History (Alt/U) when it actually works. Plus another easy way to tell if join was successful is when you select the object, all the pieces (dots) should be selected with one click.

The other odd behavior was with the Difference command (W). It is opposite of what the tutorial says. Select the cube FIRST, then select the Spheres.

I get lost on what Mode I'm supposed to be in - Object or Edit (Tab toggle), and if I'm supposed to be in Wireframe or Solid (Z key toggle). It's not always clear and it does make a difference.

I noticed jpg within Blender is higher/poorer compression (more artifacts) than optimization 20 within Paint Shop Pro 9.
So I saved the render as png within Blender and then saved as jpg within Paint Shop Pro (or whatever software to get a better quality jpg if desired).
png on the net is usually overkill.
jpg w optimization at 10-20 is usually all I need, if I don't want gif.

Unit 6 is where the world background info is. I already had figured that out earlier because I wanted a nicer background for my renders than that default dark blue.
Also talks about Subsurf.
Then discusses Booleans which is combining objects in different ways (difference, intersect, union) kinda similar to Inkscape I think.

I'm finished with Unit #6, on to Unit #7.

Blender - Materials, Lighting, Bezier Curve

I'm still studying Blender 3D software.

Worked thru Unit 4 - Coloring, Materials, Camera, Animation.
GOOD. Lots of good information here.
There's the Color Picker for choosing specific colors, which I hadn't realized was there.
There is how to lock the camera on an object which was an important tip to learn.
Introduced to the Ipo Curve Editor Window used for Animation.
The Materials pdf and sample blend file is very detailed on how to add effects like gold, silver.

NOTE: Main Index Page of Hirsig site has extra tutorials not found when following the Learning Units Links.
One that is relevant to Unit 4 Animation is entitled: "Creating An Animated GIF"

Just finished Unit 5 videos.
Lots of good info on lighting in this section.
I set up 4 views while working thru Unit 5.
There are NEW added options in my newer version Blender 2.48.1.

He always activated Add, Lamp in Top View so the lamp pointed down on the scene.
Then switched to Side View and moved it.
Default Lamp Scene has Shadow On. Shadow is Off on new lamps added.
You need Camera View to see what you will get when you render.
Then you need to render to see the light effects.
The Spot Lamp was the most complicated and acted differently than his.



The wine glass pdf tut using the Bezier Curve was difficult to follow. He refers to a "MyBlender" file which is found in Unit 3.
His Front View is my Top View. I slogged thru in Top View and then right before creating the plane I rotated the glass.
I couldn't figure out what he was doing with the Bezier Curve from the pics provided. I did a screenshot of his glass profile half before spin and imported that into Blender and used it as a guide (View, Background). I eventually found out that his stem was different (more rounded going up).