Vortographs

Taking a quick break from building an infrared photoshop tutorial I realized that I needed to start getting my midterms done. So I breezed though my school work and then I remembered my assignment for PH100, I had to brainstorm and shoot some of my final. Well how can I make this interesting? I went through my simple idea list thinking this might be fun and then I realized I didn't want anything that could be easy, or simple, or semi fun to do.

My first idea was to go on and do light painting at tourist spots of San Francisco. The idea would have been great fun but I wanted to build a L.E.D. light stick and other strange things with RGB L.E.D. lights so that wasn't going to work out in my favor for my budget. Then I remembered about vortographs.

The images I shot have only been changed in tone, no other editing has been done to them. So these are a couple vortographs from outside my apartment window.

Infrared Photoshop Tutorials (Online)

Copyright Miles Nitz

So I decided to try my hand at doing some "infrared"-esk work on some older images of mine. I found a couple of tutorials online and most of them I don't think understood what infrared actually looked like. So I provided an image from my friend Miles from when he shot some infrared of my friend Jessica.  That story aside, I am probably going to do a good tutorial on how to provide a good infrared tutorial or technique.

Tutorial number 1 was the first online black and white tutorial that I found and I originally thought it worked pretty well even though there are a couple of things I could fix or make it a bit better. The normal black and white green channel is on the right while the edited green channel is on the left. So you can see the effect of the editing.

Tutorial number 2 started in color so I was wondering where they might go with this edit. Thankfully they popped it into black and white via the channel mixer. It matches up pretty well but it probably could be improved a bit more to make it look more (tonally) like the image Miles took. So in the near future be prepared you photoheads for a small tutorial I will make about doing an infrared process. It probably will be about as complicated as the layers on the right of Tutorial #2 but it won't be too horribly complicated.

Explorations

So last Friday night I decided to explore the city with my friend Brianna and we went on a long walk to the wharf and around some of the surrounding areas. So here are some of the weird little things we ran into. I wish there was a funny story that came a long with this but since we were walking around around 11:30 p.m. till about 2 a.m. not many of the crazy homeless people were out or any of the normal crazy people. We did run into a few drunks but beyond that nothing too crazy. After a long day of disappointment from some normal work prospects this walk really cheered me up and brought me back to being in my "A Game" if you will on my job hunt. I feel fresh again, confident and pretty excited that this time I will be getting a job and one I will be happy to have.

Some interesting facts about the images though, since Simon and Lewis from the Yogscast are in San Francisco's Bay Area for the Battlefield 3 lan party the first image I am pretty sure is the aircraft carrier that they are on.  We also past a protest going on still for Occupy San Francisco. Which I was surprised that they would be protesting to practically no one considering the time. Then I saw these wonderful bread animals that smelled wonderful and I wanted to eat them all. I also walked through Little Italy and North Beach and I want to visit both of the places more.

Sutro Baths

    So last Friday my class went to the Sutro Bath's for a small class field trip. Which the area was amazing to see in the morning in comparison to what I normally see on a Friday morning ( which is normally crazy people and street garbage). Anyway the area was beautiful, I got there around 8:30 with a couple of my classmates and we enjoyed the beauty of the area. Honestly it was a really cool place and the first time I was at the beach or at the ocean since I have been in the city. I am hoping to visit the ocean areas a bit more since I moved down here and never have had the luxury of having an ocean near me.


    It was pretty cool seeing the Cliffhouse and close by was a giant camera obscura. It wasn't open when I got there but it does open up at ten in the morning if you are in the area. Overall it was a nice trip and these are some of the photos I took while I was there. It was fun taking seascapes since I never really had the opportunity to shoot them before and I really want to do a modeling shoot up here at some point but as for now I am really enjoying exploring San Francisco.

     I am thinking I might start doing a weekly travel thing soon in San Francisco where I take public transit to different areas and explore around and taking photos for a couple of hours. I will have to see how my money situation pans out for that but I would love to make this a reality instead of an idea.
    
    Anyway for my next assignment in PH100 I need to do a reshoot of the secret assignment. I can shoot either both images or just one but I need two prints from the sutro baths and from the reshoot as well.

Secret Assignment

So my recent assignment for class was a themed around "secrets" so we wrote a bunch of stuff on paper and turned it in and there were a lot of things about not having money or being poor but a couple caught my attention that I had to do. The first being " I like to dress like a crow and yell at people at 4 am out of taxi cabs". I thought woah this is great but because of some class limitations I wouldn't be able to do a direct translation so I did dress like a crow and cut out some of the rest of it. The second secret that caught my attention was a person apparently wants to be a cannibal. Or at least try human flesh in the class, not sure if that one is a blatant lie or if it is true but the second image is a take on cannibalism. Hopefully my allusion in the image comes across well but I know it will make people think and I feel it is pretty smart in a couple of ways. I won't go into too much detail on it but if you want please leave a comment about what you think it is alluding to.

Slight Differences

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Well I decided it would be a good time for a semi non school related post. One of these I might be using for homework in the near future but this post is mainly for the show of slight differences in two similar photos.

The photoshoot idea was dressing as a crow. Like I said before this might end up being used for a school assignment but I am unsure of it as my other shoots might be better and might be more appealing to the viewer.  So time will tell for that, but the model is my wonderful girlfriend Mahkayla and I think both images of her are stunning. I do like the second image more for various reasons but I am curious on what my readers think of the two shots. If you would like please tell me which image is your favorite and why.

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