![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Rock art prog
I'm in the mood for a process post so I thought I'd string together a few related pictures showing how I go from a slice of rock to something I'm proud to claim is Art. We'll follow the journey of a piece of East Java plume agate.
It all started with a tumbled piece of moss agate, looking something like this:
I was amazed at the detail my little camera could reveal, but quickly frustrated by the problems of lighting and dealing with reflections and a shallow depth of field (if you look closely at this image you can find an unexpected self portrait). I couldn't get nearly enough of these tumbled stones in focus and not ruined by reflected images of my fingers, face, sky or clouds.
Long story short, that led me to the idea of flat slabs of rock. I tried messing about with a polarised filter to take care of the glare, then struck on the idea of unpolished flat slabs. eBay to the rescue, the idea bore fruit and it's been all go since then. OK, I had to do a bit of research to find out how to describe the features I most liked about the original moss agate tumbled stone. The magic word was "plume". And "slab" come to think about it, because I didn't know that when I started either.
This is how the East Java plume agate unpolished slab looks like when photographed in natural light with the normal camera:
And then, bingo!
OK, first I got a microscope for better closeups and more pixels, which gave me interesting but washed-out images like this:
Then I figured out how to get the most from the camera settings, and how to use water to compensate for the lack of polish (but not so much I end up with the same reflection issues and no chance of focus).
That gave me lots of colourful images to play with. This is a contact sheet of a set I took using the same East Java plume agate as shown above:
Over time I learned how to use the basic MS Office picture editor to adjust a few contrast and brightness settings on a global basis. That's all that's been done to this batch of images. You might see that the colours are more vivid again:
At some point I started looking at printing options, and realised that I was going to need a lot more pixels to make prints at interesting sizes.
And then got PaintShop Photo Pro X3 for (as yet not much) minor retouching and localised brightness and contrast tinkering, with the odd application of sharpness and a bit of speckle removal. And indeed the odd bit of glare and scratch removal or compositing to merge the best bits of two images.
Here's a pair of pre- and post- images for comparison:
I didn't try to remove all the "blemishes" just reduce their impact a bit (warning this might be a bit slow to load - I forgot to make a low res version to upload it so if you click through it's a 5 MB bmp file (oops)):
There we go, just like that. OK, not quite. One of the options to get around the limited file size I get from the microscope was to create a collage of some sort. I'd seen such tools on printing websites, but just recently I discovered that part of the PaintShop Pro toolkit was a project thingie that included templates for making collages offline. This also solved the problem of trying to pick just a handful of individual shots for what could only be small prints anyway. This is what the collage looks like when it comes out:
Mind you, it was still a challenge to choose, locate, rotate, zoom and crop the selections, but at least I could fit in quite a few in the one image.
Almost there. Last step was to add borders and labels to the collage using PaintShop Photo Pro to create actual posters that were big enough and the right aspect ratio for printing. To see that final effect you'll need to come to the Swancon Art Show, where hopefully 5 of my 30 x 40cm posters will be on display and probably sale (not this one... yet, unless I'm all oohy and aahy when I see the first batch of prints).
So there we have it. If I just point a camera at something and record it, that's photography. But given all the choices I make along the way I think it's not unreasonable to call the final result Art (yes, even with that capital A, damnit). I have plans to do much more, but I drew a line in the sand here so I'd have *something* for Swancon. I have more rocks, more techniques, and more ideas to play with. I want to build even bigger images that will print at proper poster sizes. MORE POWER! And I still like the idea of setting up a redbubble (or whatever) account to sell prints; I would get a huge thrill out of sales. Stay tuned :-)
It all started with a tumbled piece of moss agate, looking something like this:
I was amazed at the detail my little camera could reveal, but quickly frustrated by the problems of lighting and dealing with reflections and a shallow depth of field (if you look closely at this image you can find an unexpected self portrait). I couldn't get nearly enough of these tumbled stones in focus and not ruined by reflected images of my fingers, face, sky or clouds.
Long story short, that led me to the idea of flat slabs of rock. I tried messing about with a polarised filter to take care of the glare, then struck on the idea of unpolished flat slabs. eBay to the rescue, the idea bore fruit and it's been all go since then. OK, I had to do a bit of research to find out how to describe the features I most liked about the original moss agate tumbled stone. The magic word was "plume". And "slab" come to think about it, because I didn't know that when I started either.
This is how the East Java plume agate unpolished slab looks like when photographed in natural light with the normal camera:
And then, bingo!
OK, first I got a microscope for better closeups and more pixels, which gave me interesting but washed-out images like this:
Then I figured out how to get the most from the camera settings, and how to use water to compensate for the lack of polish (but not so much I end up with the same reflection issues and no chance of focus).
That gave me lots of colourful images to play with. This is a contact sheet of a set I took using the same East Java plume agate as shown above:
Over time I learned how to use the basic MS Office picture editor to adjust a few contrast and brightness settings on a global basis. That's all that's been done to this batch of images. You might see that the colours are more vivid again:
At some point I started looking at printing options, and realised that I was going to need a lot more pixels to make prints at interesting sizes.
And then got PaintShop Photo Pro X3 for (as yet not much) minor retouching and localised brightness and contrast tinkering, with the odd application of sharpness and a bit of speckle removal. And indeed the odd bit of glare and scratch removal or compositing to merge the best bits of two images.
Here's a pair of pre- and post- images for comparison:
I didn't try to remove all the "blemishes" just reduce their impact a bit (warning this might be a bit slow to load - I forgot to make a low res version to upload it so if you click through it's a 5 MB bmp file (oops)):
There we go, just like that. OK, not quite. One of the options to get around the limited file size I get from the microscope was to create a collage of some sort. I'd seen such tools on printing websites, but just recently I discovered that part of the PaintShop Pro toolkit was a project thingie that included templates for making collages offline. This also solved the problem of trying to pick just a handful of individual shots for what could only be small prints anyway. This is what the collage looks like when it comes out:
Mind you, it was still a challenge to choose, locate, rotate, zoom and crop the selections, but at least I could fit in quite a few in the one image.
Almost there. Last step was to add borders and labels to the collage using PaintShop Photo Pro to create actual posters that were big enough and the right aspect ratio for printing. To see that final effect you'll need to come to the Swancon Art Show, where hopefully 5 of my 30 x 40cm posters will be on display and probably sale (not this one... yet, unless I'm all oohy and aahy when I see the first batch of prints).
So there we have it. If I just point a camera at something and record it, that's photography. But given all the choices I make along the way I think it's not unreasonable to call the final result Art (yes, even with that capital A, damnit). I have plans to do much more, but I drew a line in the sand here so I'd have *something* for Swancon. I have more rocks, more techniques, and more ideas to play with. I want to build even bigger images that will print at proper poster sizes. MORE POWER! And I still like the idea of setting up a redbubble (or whatever) account to sell prints; I would get a huge thrill out of sales. Stay tuned :-)