Old dog, new tricks.

 Every once in a while I lose some enthusiasm for photography, and that's a good thing because the next step is trying out new things. I haven't shot flowers much in a long time, partly because they don't sell very well. I don't know why. I like them. Anyway for the image above I tried some new techniques involving a high pass filter as a layer, a blurred image as a layer, some color tweaking as layers, a black and white version as another layer, etc.

 The above is the smiley version of my dad. Lighting conditions: backlit. I used fill flash on the above. It took some fair amount of tweaking just to undo some of the nasty effects of fill flash, like those little pinpoint reflections for example which pop up everywhere on the teeth, eyes, even pores of the skin. These are pretty much just snapshots which I then touched up. from a human, everyday point of view, the above is pretty much the image/impression you'd get of my dad in person and that's what I was going for. I know some photographers want to make every image "pop", but I seriously don't always find that appropriate. I want people who know Bruce to look at a picture like this and go "yeah! That's the Bruce I know."

Now this on the other hand, isn't really Bruce. Any photographer can catch an odd image and run with it. Diane Arbus was particularly good at this. I thought I'd give a try at something dramatic. This is the same snapshot conditions as the other one, but instead of fill-flash I overexposed by one stop and purposefully blew out the background. Then I proceeded to use a bunch of editing tricks. I find the light much more interesting in this one. My dad was a good sport, it's not terribly flattering.