In Photos dot org

Margi is an artist and business woman living in Oracle, Arizona in the US. She makes beautiful handmade jewelry and glass beads from this small building near an iron smith in the town. I bought a few items for my wife and she loves them.

If you’re near Oracle, call in and say hi. She’s busy but is lovely to chat with and will gladly sell you beautiful jewelry!

This is John Sullivan, a man we met near the beach at Allihies in West Cork a few days ago. He’s quite a remarkable man, especially as he will be 91 in June. I’ll be very happy with myself if I’m as fit and healthy as he is when I celebrate my 91st birthday!

The photo isn’t the best I could manage but I only took the one shot and wanted to share it. There was a very strong light behind him from the afternoon sun and I used the on-camera flash to fill in the shadows as best I could.

The German Deep Purple

This group of lads wandered into the old switching station on Caroline Street during the filming of Stanley Super 800’s video so I took their photo.

Apparently they are a German Deep Purple cover band but it was hard to figure out what their name was because they hardly spoke a word of English and my German is non-existant! They were playing in the Old Oak that night so chances are they’ll be back!

The guy in the back is in the Stanley Super 800 video. Look out for the bouncers, he’s one of them. I can’t remember his name, but I had a great chat with him during the filming.

Girls on the street

St. Patrick’s Day brought out a huge crowd onto the streets and here’s a group of girls we bumped into on Patrick’s Street.

We were on our way to a cafe for refreshment when I spotted a bicycle chained to a pole, but it had fallen down. As is my way I crouched down to get a shot of the wheel and the pole receding into the sky and when I got up this group of girls were looking at me. One asked what I was doing and of course I had to take their photo since they were enjoying themselves so much!

PS. Thank you Meg for linking to my blog at Cute Overload. Your blog must do some savage amount of traffic if referrers from your site are anything to go by. I did as much traffic here yesterday as I’d normally do on ocaoimh.ie!
PPS. Greetings to Zefrank too. I agree, check out the show, although can there be anyone left who hasn’t seen Ze Frank at least once?

I like these. Claire went exploring an old house: part 1, part 2.

I like these too - Donal’s Stomp photos are particularly good especially as they were taken at a live performance and in a darkened theatre! Very good!

Gatecrashing on Caroline Street

Another shot from Sunday at Stanley Super 800’s recording of the Gatecrashing video. The multi-shot posts are such a pain to do the rest of these will be single photo posts!

Three Gatecrashing Guys

Three members of the audience at Stanley Super 800’s recording of the music video, Gatecrashing at Caroline St. Cork on Sunday.

I look good!

A street performer from Cork Circus, a street theatre company, poses for a photo on Patrick’s Street, Cork.

That reminds me, I must email him the URL of this blog as he was interested in photos!

Staring at me

Am I feeling conspicuous or what?

I tried shooting from the hip yesterday with the strap of my camera over my shoulder and my camera in a horizontal position instead of being wrapped around my hand in a vertical orientation.

It proved useful, but I found that:

1. More of my shots were blurry, perhaps because either the back and forth movement of me walking. I tried shooting in Tv (Shutter Priority mode) and even at 1/200sec and higher there was shake.
2. It’s great getting more of the surroundings in but I miss the feet.

You may have seen this already, it’s on delicious, but it’s something I’ll read over later so I want to mention it. This airbrush tutorial is very detailed, showing each step with accompanying screenshots.
The result is quite a stunning image in the Playboy tradition of perfect skin and tones. Fake but it’s what people want!

I posted a similar touch-up tutorial a few months ago, but it concentrated on general techniques for giving a portrait more punch.

In this post I’m going to show you how to go post-process this image:

By the end, we’ll have an image that looks like this:

This tutorial was created using the GIMP, but it’s equally applicable to your favourite editing software as long as it has the same tools. Photoshop, and other editing software should work equally well.
The steps described here are worth practising, and will apply equally well to any portrait!

First of all, I came across this photo on Flickr through my contacts page. Here’s the original photo, and Ayhtnic kindly let me use her image.

After you load the image, the first thing to do is use Auto Levels from the Layer->Colors menu. This tool alone does wonders for most photos, especially if they’ve been captured as Jpeg straight from the camera.

The image is a little noisy so let’s clean it up a bit. Use Selective Gaussian Blur from the Filters->Blur menu. Use small values as we just want to smudge the noise away without losing too much detail. A radius of 3, and delta of 10 worked fairly well here.

Let’s brighten it a bit and add contrast. Use the Curves tool from Layers->Colors for this. The classic “S” shape always adds life to a photo.

Open the Layers dialog and duplicate the background layer.

Select the new layer (called “background copy” here) and use the Curves tool again to brighten this layer a lot.

With the same layer selected (the top one, the “background copy”), we’ll apply some blur. Open up the Gaussian Blur tool, it’s in Filters->Blur. Apply a blur of 5 pixels to the top layer. Don’t worry, we’re not finished!

We’re going to change the “mode” of the top layer now. With the top layer selected, click on the drop down box that says “Normal” and scroll down to “Soft Light”. You can also try other modes, they’ll make for interesting photos!
Notice how the image suddenly changed?

Even with the nice glowing effect, the image looks indistinct. Let’s sharpen the bottom layer. Select that layer in the Layers dialog and load the “Unsharp Mask” filter. This is in Filters->Enhance->Unsharp Mask.
Don’t apply too much sharpening. Make it subtle. The settings in the screenshot work well.

All that’s left is to save the image, save it with a quality setting of 92%. Don’t bother with higher as it’s practically impossible to see any difference in quality.

The finished photo