Sunday's thought for Monday, with thanks to anti-pixel dot com, who has managed to say it in a much more poetic and veracious way than I ever could.
Beware of incompetent people:
"Incompetents have fewer options for self-preservation than the rest of us and will fight like shithouse rats when cornered and expected to perform. Their cunning is often inversely proportional to their talent, and it is this, sycophantically applied, upon which they rely."
Well I made it, 1000 images on flickr, decided to make an image though, as it just gets too damn difficult to choose from the archives, or current images.
Well it's a sad day indeed for the world and for journalism, Hunter S Thompson is dead.
I can personally attest to the fact that he made me fall off a couch while reading his tome ‘The Great Shark Hunt’, Thankyou Hunter for sharing your wit and insights with the world, sadly this is another nail in the coffin for a free and democratic press in countries like USA!
When will it end, it seems they're off again? How many more countries are they going to occupy?
U.S. Uses Drones to Probe Iran For Arms (washingtonpost.com via Yahoo! News): "The Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran for nearly a year to seek evidence of nuclear weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses, according to three U.S. officials with detailed knowledge of the secret effort."
This image is from my new digital phone camera, which has a function that allows, me to make panoramas, (without the use of photoshop) a no mean feat in itself, but having examined this one after the fact, I realised that there had been a considerable amount of time in between the 1st and the 3rd shots resulting in a some strange looking body language, and poses. This has me thinking about time and photography, it's long been a well known fact that photography is a slice of time, but what about the idea that several slices are rejoined to form a cohesive whole, yet slightly disjointed whole?
hmmmmmm?
Indeed hmmmm…
I have started small run publishing of photographic art books, and late last year produced my first book, entitled 'Typologies I' the intention was to produce a series of typologies, an idea I may or may not run with. So the next book is tentatively entitled “ Art & Mathematics…” This is the current opening image from it, click it and you can visit flickr where I have a set dedicated to it's production, this is the main reason I use flickr, to create sets of digital images for later use… oh and to have a little fun too with my camera! I have in the past talked about work-flows and analogue, well I guess this is the equivalent of a proofing and editing process that used to be done with real physical prints, now I can sequence and organise my prints and get a rough idea how they sit together before even hitting Indesign™.
In completely unrelated news, how popular is your name?
You maybe pleasantly surprised?
What is Photoshop? It's a popular high-end image editor for the Macintosh and Windows from Adobe. The original Mac versions were the first to bring affordable image editing down to the personal computer level in the late 1980s. Since then, Photoshop has become the de facto standard in image editing. Although it contains a large variety of image editing features, one of Photoshop's most powerful capabilities is layers, which allows images to be rearranged under and over each other for placement. Photoshop is designed to read and convert to a raft of graphics formats, but it provides its own native format for layers (.PSD extension).
Adobe Photoshop is a bitmap graphics editor (with some text and vector graphics capabilities) published by Adobe Systems. It is the market leader for commercial bitmap image manipulation. It is usually referred to simply as "Photoshop". As with most of other Adobe's applications, Photoshop is available for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows; versions up to Photoshop CS 8.0 can also be run under operating systems such as Linux with an emulation program such as CrossOver Office. In the past, a port to SGI IRIX existed, but this was dropped before version 4.
The development of Photoshop started in 1987 by the brothers Thomas Knoll and John Knoll, although it was not until 1990 that the program was first released by Adobe. The program was intended from the start as a tool for manipulating images that were digitized by a scanner, which was a rare and expensive device in those days. Although primarily designed to edit images for paper-based printing, Photoshop is used increasingly to produce images for the World Wide Web. Recent versions have been shipped with a separate application, ImageReady, which provides a more specialised set of tools for this purpose.
As of 2003, Photoshop is at version 8, called CS by Adobe to reflect its integration with their "Creative Suite". Photoshop CS features a revolutionary command : 'Shadow/Highlight' which allow user to 'suppress' highlights and/or 'push out' shadows while maintaining most of the 'image details' (i.e. the histogram would remain virtually unchanged). It also comes with Adobe Camera RAW, a plugin developed by Thomas Knoll which has the ability to read several RAW file formats from various digital cameras and import them directly into Photoshop. A preliminary version of the RAW plugin was also available for Photoshop 7.0.1 as a $99 USD optional purchase. The term photoshopping is a neologism, meaning "editing an image", regardless of the program used. Adobe discourages use of the term [1] out of fear that it will undermine the company's trademark; an alternate term which leaves out the Photoshop reference is "photochop".
The term photoshop is also used as a noun referring to the altered image. This is specially popular amongst members of the websites Something Awful, Fark and Worth1000 where photoshopping is an institution, with the goal of altering an image, subtly or blatantly, to make it humorous or just clever, by appealing to both the slapstick- or intellectual-level of humor, often via the use of obscure in-jokes and pop culture references. A very recent and even more obscure variety of this, is the so called "Fake": extreme parodying of the current celebrity culture, by blending famous faces with nude or pornographic images. Photoshop competitions in all these varieties have become a favourite passtime for many professional and amateur users of the software. The term is sometimes used with a derogatory intent by artists to refer to images that have been retouched instead of originally produced. A common issue amongst users of all skill levels is the ability to avoid in one's work what is referred to as "the Photoshop look" (although such an issue is intrinsic to many graphics programs). Photoshop is generally considered one of the best (if not the best) image editing programs for raster graphics, but it has the disadvantage of a high price. This has allowed competing programs such as Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro and The GIMP Team's GIMP to become popular. To capture this lost market share, Adobe has introduced a much less expensive program called Photoshop Elements that consists of Photoshop minus some of the high-end output capabilities, useful for editing photos from consumer digital cameras and for doctoring images for the web but not as useful for professional prepress work.
Release history
Photoshop 1.0 (Mac OS) : February 1990
Photoshop 2.0 (Mac OS) : June 1991
Code Name : Fast Eddy
New Features :
Added Paths
Photoshop 2.0.1 (Mac OS): January 1992
Photoshop 2.5 (Mac OS): November 1992
Code Names : Merlin (Mac), Brimstone (Windows)
Photoshop 2.5.1 (Mac OS): 1993
Photoshop 3.0 : September 1994 (Mac) - November 1994 (Win)
Code Name : Tiger Mountain (Mac OS)
New Features :
Tab Palettes
Photoshop 4.0 : November 1996
Code Name : Big Electric Cat
New Features:
Adjustment Layers
Editable type (previously, type was rasterized as soon as it was added)
Photoshop 4.0.1 : August 1997
Photoshop 5.0 : May 1998
Code Name : Strange Cargo
New Features:
Color Management
Photoshop 5.0.1 : 1999
Photoshop 5.5 : February 1999
New Features:
Extract
Vector Shapes
Photoshop 6.0 : September 2000
Code Name : Venus in Furs
introduced the 'liquify' filter
Photoshop 6.1 : March 2001
Photoshop 7.0 : April 2002
Code Name : Liquid Sky
New Features :
Made text fully vector
Healing Brush
Photoshop 7.0.1 : August 2002
New Features :
Adobe Camera RAW 1.0 (optional)
Photoshop CS : October 2003
Code Name : Dark Matter
New Features :
Adobe Camera RAW 2.0
Shadow/Highlight Command
Match Colour command
'Lens blur' filter
Real-Time Histogram
Coming soon my critique of photoshop and what you aren't told about it.
This article is from wikipedia, and is used here without premission. I also have another article on my website that looks at the history of this behemoth program.
Digital photographs manipulated in photoshop, are they somehow less “ photographic”?
According to some folks over at flickr yes.
This notion displays a lack of understanding of the entire photographic process to my mind. Manipulating photos in a program like Photoshop™ is simply processing. All photographs are processed. Analog ones in chemistry, digital ones in a computer. All digital photos whether scanned form film or downloaded from a digital camera require some level of manipulation, the degree of manipulation required depends on several factors, the means by which the image was captured, and the output device, (there maybe others but I can'think of them just yet).
So here's a scenario, you choose to shoot in RAW for because like me you don't trust some camera manufacturers idea of what an image should look like. This image upon downloading requires processing of some sort, otherwise you have an image whilst full of digital information visually may express nothing, or what about the other extreme, you are travelling and don't want to fill up your cards to quickly, so you settle for a jpeg from the camera, even these are not as crisp as they can be and require some intervention in the process. My point is digital manipulation is no more unphotographic than push or pull processing, burning or dodging or spotting, there is no cheating going on. Anyone who thinks there is doesn't understand the process.
Photography Books aren't just about pictures, once again Peter Marshall over on photography about dot com has an article worth reading. so if you want to learn how to take better pictures or learn how to ‘read’ your own and others photos then have read of his article.
Recent addtions to my flickr account/site:-
For both of my readers, I have also uploaded an image from my desktop of the info from the folder where I store my camera files. It's been a busy 5 weeks I can tell you but I just know things will slow down, particularly in the winter months when daylight is short and workloads are in full swing! Still 1442 images is nothing to sneeze at, of course not all of them made it to flickr but those that did I'm pretty happy with and of course will use the sets feature to ‘organise’ the images for further publication elswhere, probably as books.
We had some serious rain here in Melbourne over the last 2 days, our local creek almost broke it's banks. Last night I went down and snapped off a few shots, so I'll post them later at flicker.
I took a couple of panoramas using the panorama assit option on my Nikon Coolpix camera, and then tried to assemble them in photoshop. The results are OK but because I didn't use a tripod they are a little wonky, which is easy enough to fix in photoshop, or i can just leave them as a slightly off and wonky ‘Cubist/Hockney’ style image.
What fun you can have if you have the inclination!
Briefly:-
tripod,
3 shots (with self timer in this case)
opened in photoshop
shift dragged two images on the top,
create masks through them so you can see the other layers below.
