Photo Composition's

I'm now fairly comfortable with my Mac and I'm slowly but surely starting to get my head around photoshop. I'm still not too happy with my masking. Deke makes it look so easy and I must admit I tend to agree with his comment that feathering is a great technique to hide a poorly masked image, better to perfect the mask.

Now there are a lot of awesome professional photographers out there who will use Lightroom to bring out the best in their photo's as do I but they are against photoshop because it can be used to enhance the original photo to a ridiculous degree. These people are the purists among us and they do have great talent but there are a great many of us who are Artists first and Photographers second and we want to use photography and photoshop to express ourselves.

David Hockney (renowned english photographer) believes that chemical processing of photographs has been replaced by photoshop and I tend to agree. Digital photography is evolving very quickly, mind you so did chemical photography a hundred years ago - for it's time.  A lot of the processing has been taken up with advances in technology even back when SLR camera's started employing different modes and filters. The latest DSLR and DSLT Camera's even go so far as to offer three stop photo merging in camera and of course the filters in camera are mind blowing. There is still however the need for processing to make good photo's great, hence applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop RAW.

Personally I am enjoying the use of various filters both on camera and in photoshop. I really love the fact that one can exercise one's creative curiosity and explore different compositions of light, colour and various subject elements. Can you just imagine what Picasso, Leanardo da Vinci or Michelangelo could have done with the tools at our disposal today, the mind boggles.

I've included a few of my compositions here and you won't have to look too closely to find my mistakes. These samples are not available in high resolution unless of course someone specifically asks for them.

My first attempt, I have a few photo's of Bonnie Ronnie and I on our 1600 Kwaka Nomad (No the bike is not a Harley or a Harley look-alike since it is an Indian look-alike but shaft driven with a radiator to prevent heat seizures) 

I was getting a little more adventurous here and wanted to somehow incorporate a technique provided by Gavin Hoey, the 'Magazine Page'. I am well pleased with the magazine page look and the mistakes with my masking are not as visible due to the perspective distortion that I have used. I did however really struggle with the masking of the Motorcycle windshield.

In this photo I was able to crate a great mask of the Truck (I've posted this Truck once before in the original photo). I struggled with the Moon's mask for some reason and the more I tried to correct the problem, the worse it became. The look is not too bad in soft photo above but I was after some serious contrast and detail which I did achieve in the photo below but the masking mistakes are pretty obvious.

To get the golden effect I switched to Black and White, except the Moon, flattened the image then removed Blue from an added RGB layer and tinkered with the detail and blur to enhance the contrast whilst keeping the photo dark.

Till next time, take care.