Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Street Art - a folio of images

I have been working to create a folio of images. The new HP B9180 printer is beyond belief. I just LOVE that thing. All I do is take an image (scanned or native digital), work it in the Gimp (a free Open Source image manipulator that rivals full blown PhotoShop), and send the finished image along to the printer. Out comes something like this.

I'm thrilled!

Now... it's off to make a folio of Street Art from India (movie poster art, actually), three folios of images from World Heritage Site temples from the Hoysala Dynasty (found in Southern India), and a folio of color images from around Karnataka state. I think I'll add a quotation from Indian poetry to each image too.

See what happens when a person "gets started?"

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

India - working on a sadhu part two

I realized after yesterday's post that comparisons between the various tints might be difficult. Each image was handled individually. So any consistancy between the images for contrast, resolution, and tint handling might be invalid.

Here's my second try. The first image uses Ken Lee's "Bronze Quadtone".



The next image uses my sampled chocolate. This is the one I think is a little too magenta. But I'm willing to reconsider this position.



The last image uses my sampled second chocolate tone, with yellow added to the mid-range and very slight yellow added to the highlights.



I'm not yet sure, but it feels as if Ken's quadtone tint has more depth than the two chocolates I sampled.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

India - working on a sadhu

I was recently visiting the Sri Gopalswami Temple in Southern India. Periodically I visit the state of Karnataka on business. This trip I hauled the wee-digi-snapper instead of my usual 4x5 inch Ikeda Anba view camera. The goal was to get "sufficient" image quality while being mobile and unteathered to a tripod.

In general the experiment worked well. I was able to take images, look at them briefly and then reposition myself for another go at a subject if I felt it needed it.

The sadhu was sitting near the entrance of the temple and was begging for money. My colleague gave him a few rupees while I attempted to capture something of the spirit of this man and his way of being in the world.

After I returned home I "sampled" a chocolate color from one of the chocolate, well, colors. I dropped this into the Gimp to see what might happen. I LOVE this color, but I think I need to work a little on a few of the tones. I have images were I needed to bring the shadow detail "up" and the coloration in the highlights suffers to become nearly duo-tone.

In the mean time, here are three comparison color "samples". The first is Ken Lee's "Bronze Quadtone" palette.



This image was toned using a straight chocolate "sample" over the standard grayscale. No alterations were made beyond what Gimp gave me. I'm not sure I like the tones yet as it appears to be too magenta on my LCD displays.



The last image shared here is with a second chocolate color that I sampled. This time the color came from one of the commercial chocolate supplier backgrounds. After I "sampled" the color over a standard grayscale, I noticed that it too contained too much red or magenta for my taste. So I bumped the mid-tone yellow up a bit and tweaked the shadow with just a smidge of yellow too. It's not half bad and is getting closer to the chocolate tones I'm looking for. I may have to play with this palette a bit to get it "perfect", but at least this is a start.