Unfocused Brain

Tomb in Cathédrale St-Just-et-St-Pasteur Narbonne France

These are all photos that were taken back in early 2006 in Paris. This was before I really knew about he potentials of HDR tonemapping. Here I used a technique where I convert a normal Jpeg to a 32bit image then do tone mapping.

Les Halles

Palais De Justice

La Madeleine

Square du Temple

Still life of some $ store terracotta warriors. Lit with led flashlights.

Image is a HDR Tonemap of 3 photos. With some color correction.

I am starting a new series of photos.

The idea is to make macabre still life photos. Using sculpture, HDR-Tonemapping, and color manipulation.

Here is my first try:

This is a highly processed photo of a sculpture that I made using copper wire, clay, plaster, and acrylic paint.

It does not seem like I will for a while. I have posted a new HDR. This time I posted it to photosig.com where people can leave feedback and criticism.

I have updated my gallery with some HDR’s of the filling station and the intel building.

Flickr Gallery

See my gallery of tonemap images.

Skip all this and go straight to the Gallery.

There is nothing like the feeling of buying a fresh pack of Sharpies®. A brand new 24 pack in my hand represents tremendous potential. I could label things, do a little drawing or coloring, or anything. They are so neat and tidy, all of the colors are still there, I haven’t lost any yet.

The last time I bought a new pack of them I decided that I wanted to try something different with them. I have a pack of glossy thick almost card stock paper that the Sharpies ® just glide over when I color on them. There is something very meditative about coloring with one on a slick piece of paper.

Everyone knows what a Sharpie ® is. But just in case you don’t know, they are multi-use markers made by Sanford. Originally I think they came in eight colors but now I think the color count is reaching close to 30.

Seeing that many colors before me I decided that I should try something different than I had tried before with this new set. I picked a night time photo of the Eiffel Tower that I had taken while in Paris. Since the photo has large areas of black I would get to just color for a large portion of it. Rather than focus on the form of the tower I decided to look at the color. I used a program from Stoik Hobby Software called Color by Number. This program will take a photo and reduce it to a predefined color range. The results were ok but I wanted a little more detail that I was able to achieve with this method.

Since I started with a photo in Paris, I decided to make it my theme while doing my experimenting. Next I chose another night time photo of columns in front of St. Sulpice.

This time I used Photoshop to prep my image. Starting with the original, I adjusted the colors to increase the contrast and boost the brightness. Then I converted the image to a indexed color image using a custom sharpie palette that I had prepared. To reduce the colors to larger shapes I bumped this image up to RGB again then ran the super magic wonderful cutout filter. (Filters -> Artistic -> Cutout) Then I reduced the color again to the sharpie palette. From this I separated each color into its own layer, then printed out each color onto its own sheet of paper. Lastly I traced each color one at a time onto a slick sheet of paper using a light table. All of this may sound complex and needing of more explanation. I agree. I do plan on writing a step by step tutorial of this technique soon.

I did a couple more in this style of ‘color separations’ then the last one I have completed I decided to do using only a black Sharpie ®. This one is of the front of Notre Dame cathedral.

Here is my B&W one color rendering:

This was the original photo:

Now I plan on doing at least one more of Paris before moving on. I thought that it might also be interesting to try a pop art style similar to Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings.