JMRead

another mistake

a mistake

14 hours ago, Clicker said:

All pretty complicated  for  me .... it would probably take me less time to train as a ballet dancer  than learn  how to do  all that JEM  !!

Hello Clicker,

I must admit that I was a bit daunted when I first saw that desktop. I looked on YT and found a simple 'how to' followed it using two windows and the next day did this.

I only ever use about 5% of the program, just one small figure at a time. The 'downside' of the program is the time it takes to render an image. An ordinary graphic card like those built into GPU will take ages I bought a used Nvidia one, with 4000px high figure even that takes about an hour, at 1080px to fit in a video frame is faster at about 10 to fifteen minuties.

I did go to the Brum Royal Ballet and ask if I could take some pics to montage into others. The answer handed down from 'Madame' was emphatic NO! I got the feeling that ballet to the standard of the BRB and others like it exist only in a parallel universe.

How the sculptor managed to get this amazes me every time I look at it. Margot Fonteyn's statue in her home town Reigate

She flows into that pose and floats. And not even one finger position is unplanned the whole thing is her construct learned after many years of practice and being able to do this from one movement to another time after time and make it look just SO easy.

Cheers - J

On 09/11/2022 at 08:28, CMunzel said:

That's all very interesting. I feel like I should know but I don't - what is DAZ3D?

Hello Cheryl, https://www.daz3d.com/ is some free software that includes some basic stuff, including a few figures that can be posed down to individual finger joints

This is not the default pose one gets this one has had quite a lot done to it, but is not finished, it needs to be spun round and the fingers and toes need to be attended to. The figures can then be lit using the lighting function and then rendered as a PNG and pasted into an image. Doing this is quite difficult as well otherwise they will look as thought they are just floating.  Does it make do for a proper ballet dancer, it doesn't but does go somewhere towards it.

Cheers - J

Hello there,

Some years ago I downloaded the trial version of Poser it was rubbish. A few weeks ago I thought I would have a look again and found DAZ3D which is free (hooray) Things have improved and one can alter a figure down to finger joints.

I've always thought that ballet dancers did the best poses making difficult stuff look so natural. Well try to engage one in a shoot one needs deep pockets not only to pay the dancer but also the studio to take the pics. And will the photographs be OK to montage into a particular scene, I doubt it.

DAZ3D is free and they make money by selling clothes and stuff Ballet dancers don't wear very much so that doesn't cost very much. Google Images is a great place to find poses and to copy them, well try at least.

My wife looked at the one above and said that's K.Thorn OK I said. Well she is only an enthusiastic amateur, but she always turns up, is never late and will always have a really good go at a pose.

Might post another soon

Cheers - J

Hello all,

Out of interest I loaded my copy of Ps7 from 2002
To see if it would work on Win10 and if it was as fast as CS6 
And what would happen to a Save As with a JPEG

It does work and works blazingly fast
A Saved As JPEG shows no difference at all
The save for web does a GIF so I didn't bother with that
I did reduce it to 800 x 600 and that shows no difference
This was all done with the 'out of box' program

I do like CS6 but think I wasted my money, I bought into a group licence purchase.
And I only paid £25 for a genuine Ps7, such is life

Cheers

Hello Fuji,

The clone tool can be used to get this effect and lots of others too, use it upon itself and choose various modes.

Cheers

Thanks Clicker that works with a JPEG

Cheers

Hello Phil,

Tried this myself in CS6;

JPEG  Save as - get both on screen at 100% the opposite of what you get, desaturation and blur

TIFF Save as - get both on screen at 100% both exactly the same.

I've noticed this before and always use Unsharp Mask and Hue/Saturation to get the same images, again at 100%. If that's one of the cloud versions your using looks as though they've over compensated. Or vice versa if you are using an older version.

Cheers

Hello Mary and Hello all,

I did some street photography a few years I went to our local town and wandered around taking pics of whatever took my eye. After a few weeks I sat down to and looked through all my pics to find a theme, something that I could grab and use to go off in one direction.

I also looked for what I was not doing and realised that I'd only got a few pics of old people and concentrated on that as well. It's quite easy to pursue say three projects I found that one just gets boring.

The result of photographing the old I called The Unobserved, here's a pic below and the link leads to the 29 others I just put up a quick slide show: http://www.jemraid.co.uk/unobserved.html

Cheers

Hello all,

I make my own using the Japanese Stab Binding method easy to do and surprisingly strong.

Cheers

Hello Stravinsky,

This maybe of some help, I use XN View the free version, it works like a fast file manager, all I have to do open an image in Ps is to press ALT+1, easy to set that up and will open multiple images by using CTRL.

https://www.xnview.com/en/

Cheers

Hello KC,

I walk the same paths for years and never get tired of it, the light, the time of year, the time of day all change. My ideas of what I want change as well and when they do I know exactly where to go.

I will say a bit more going to an area for the first time this results in skimming the surface, taking the 'nice' images in the manner of Francis Frith, go again, you can't take those, so you look for something else, eventually you get to taking really thoughtful and personal images that are far more satisfying than the 'postcard' pics.

A rather extreme example of this is Thomas Joshua Cooper, Prof of photography at Glasgow School of Art. He takes his 1898 field camera and one sheet of film to a pre-planned spot and sits and waits for the photograph to come to him. Sounds a bit daft but when I first tried it feeling like a complete fool I looked behind the tree I was sitting against and there it was :-)

Cheers

Thanks for the interest all,

Thanks Fuji, Nice of you to say that, like you I love experimenting.

Hello Kev, The wood was at one time filled with 4WD idiots until the farmer fenced it. Those lines coincided with the sun and made it just right for what I wanted.

Hello Korky, There is a (hidden?) history of the figure in the landscape, where the figure is part of the image and not just its subject, I pose as my characters Everyman and Everywoman, I've been doing it now for 6 years and got used to the idea although it's 500 years old. I use Ps CS6 it's the fastest one I've come across I used Ps7 2002 and Ps4 1994 prior to that.

Hello Ryewolf, I think Anne has had an enormous influence on photographers perhaps as much as JMC, photographers today have no idea whose images they are emulating there seems to be dreadful lack of historical photographic knowledge. The worst thing about it is that it's much easier to find now that it ever was, the photographers of the pivotal photo secession are well documented all over the web.

In this image I was not trying to make anything like Claude, Bill and Anne but trying to find out if I could get someway into creating the light and how to do it, the brown paper worked quite well. I can only use my own source materials and what's between my ears, the problem I faced was using light pouring into the image which would render a figure almost as a silhouette and I wanted both lit so I had to 'cheat' in the same way Claude and Bill did. That is the beauty in stepping away from the single image and into a creation of my own making I begin to understand what they did and how difficult it was.

Cheers

Hello all,

Pydale wood in November, I took the pic with the space for a figure on the right. This is my first attempt at a legacy image. I see in my mind Claude Lorrain's images and Turner's early one's, in his will Turner asked that two of his paintings should be shown next to two of Claude's so that people could see where Turner came from, they are still there in the National Gallery. 

The other part of the legacy is the work of Anne W Brigman who posed nude in the landscape for a self portrait called 'The Soul of the Blasted Pine' in 1908. A wonderfully evocative image of her stretching to the sky with all the tautness she could muster. 

Everyone has to start somewhere and I'm no exception, I began this with the light which I brightened even to drawing a yellow circle, yellow looking brighter than white. I wasn't happy with just that so added some stained brown paper under the sky and trees bit, tried a few blend modes 'Color' worked and I used a Reveal All mask to improve the sunlight. I used a partial Paint filtration to give the trees on the right that feathery look and brightened the foreground with the Clonne tool.

The lighting on the figure was the wrong way round I have to pose in a one position in a room and use a couple of speedlights so I had to darken the right and do the rim lighting on the left.

Every time though I learn a little bit more and now have a better idea of what to do.

Cheers

Hello Fuji,

I think all the stuff about Win10 is the usual rubbish, I'm using for instance Office 2003 and Ps7 they both work superbly. I also use Classic Shell to make it look like a proper computer and not a kiddies toy: http://www.classicshell.net/

Cheers

Hello Bill,

Nice of you to comment I do appreciate it.

Cheers

Hello Paul,

In 1998 I came across the work of Catherine McIntyre http://cmci.websign.ru/ 

I spent the next 13 years prevaricating and disappearing up photographic blind alleys, only to find that they were a complete waste of time. I knew all along that what I really wanted to do was tackle the montages, but was too scared to start. I did try a few times but thought the results were horrible failures.

In 2011 I said to Vicky that I would put everything to one side to concentrate on teaching myself how to make the montages. I began knowing a little bit about cutting stuff out and other odds and ends. Now I make videos from montaged still images and have had 21 screenings across the world.

Your probably thinking what's this self congratulatery idiot doing! Well! Do you have something deep inside you that you really want to do? Have a good look, don't be guided by others, if you see it as a mountain as I did, don't prevaricate, like I did, do it, plunge in head first. When you find it you'll never want to do anything else.

Them as never made a mistake never made anything.

Cheers

Hello Korky,

I'm delighted with the uneasy and the sexual overtones, hooray! But I can't accept the 'slightly' I did my best with the pose. 

The suits are made from Lycra and mine are made bespoke in China. They are called Zentai shortened from zenshin taitsu (full body suit) a person called Marcy Anarchy invented them in 1985. I think the weird magazine image has gone on to something else in the intervening 33 years. The suits are the subject of many festivals in Japan, Singapore and the USA.

I'm pleased that it's made you think a bit and for your interest, thanks.

Cheers

Paul Strand ....... isn't bland

(1915)

Hello Fuji,

I think the gentleman has found Paul Strand and perhaps Minor White and is trying to get something better and sadly failing. Such is life.

Cheers

Hello Clicker and Hello 7D,

I agree about the sci-fi thing, it's one of those when putting together three images results in something with a quite different feel to it even though two of them are quite bland. 

The techinique does add something to even the most innocuous image like this old gate.

Cheers both

Hello all,

I bought a mono Laser printer for about thirty quid and tried a B&W image on it, it failed. Searching for B&W images I cam across this site: http://www.photo-kako.com/en/block-print.cgi

Hmmm I thought surely I could do better than that and after fiddling with bits in Ps I came up with a way to make an image from just pure black and pure white. Which prints beautifully from the Laser onto Japanese Simili paper.

The image is a composite one I call 'Slit'; me, some rock and some pines and a few jaggy bits cut out of the rock.

Cheers 

Ohh and apparently they are called binary prints

[the image looks greyish because of the reduction from the original]

Hello all,

Long time no post I received an email from TIPF today with posts in this Self Portrait thread. I'd changed to Win10 and the email thingy is useless so I'm using Thunderbird and that got the lot from BT including the Spam which the SP email was in. There must have been 100's up there on BT that I never saw using Win Live Mail. Such is life!

This is my shadow and me one September evening, I took the pic because the light was so gorgeous but never found a use for it until this afternoon.

Cheers - Jem

Hello all,

A bit of a how to;

http://www.m1ju29photobookclub.co.uk/make.html

I started a photo book club ostensibly to look at books by well known photographers, this turned into the members (there are only few of us) making their own photobooks after I brought one in that I'd made.

The club will be turning into the M1Ju29 Photo Project Group very soon to broaden the appeal. Lots of people have contacted me but I think are put off by making their own books. Phtot projects can be turned into videos using Windows Movie Maker see this post of mine today: http://www.tipf.co.uk/index.php/topic/9786-two-photo-essays-one-street-photography-the-other-in-an-old-quarry/

Cheers - Jim