Fonthill, Pennsylvania

Driveway, Fonthill, Bucks County, Pennsylvania

This image goes back a few years when I visited Fonthill in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with my friend John Barclay.  John runs workshops and photo tours out of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

According to Wikipedia Fonthill was the home of Henry Chapman Mercer from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  Constructed in the early 1900's with 44 rooms and over 200 windows...The home contains many decorative tiles the Mercer made during the Arts and Crafts movement as well as artifacts from his world travels. Next door to Fonthil sits the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works also built by Henry Mercer...

If you ever find yourself in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania area stop by - well worth your time.


I will be making a presentation at the Photography Club of Lower Fairfield County in  Stamford, Connecticut  on Wednesday night, January 18   Click here HERE for information. Hope to see you there...

 

Another Flower

Not enough time today - went to see the new Harry Potter in Imax....but I did play with a flower image from the dentist's office the other day...

Image Management:

Hipstamatic
Johns
Kodot
Iris
Filterstorm
Auto Painter II
Artista Haiku

4 days until Iceland trip....

Bicycle - Central State Hospital

Bicycle, Central State Hospital

 After my Apple Store presentation on Saturday a friend got us into Central State Hospital for the Insane. The hospital was first built in 1848 and was abandoned in 1994.

The first building we walk into has this plastic children's bicycle right in the doorway - I am thinking if this is the only image I make today the trip was worth the price of admission. Oh, did i tell you about my attraction to bicycles....seems like they keep appearing at the strangest places and times....might have to do a show just on abandoned bicycles and what they mean to me...

This image was captured using TrueHDR on a tripod. Pretty much used my current workflow for processing:

Perfect Photo
Artista Haiku
Filterstorm
Iris

By the way the Apple Store presentation went very well. The folks working there could not have been any more helpful. Used my iPad23 hooked to a large Apple Monitor and that was a bit easier then the old set-up of camera over iPhone system. The only drawback, if a drawback at all, is that you can not see the stylus making the move on the screen. Other then that the iPad2 is a game changer. One cable to the screen and you are in up and running...

Music and Iphone

John Mellencamp, Los Angeles, 1996

'Forget all about that macho shit and learn how to play guitar'...John Mellencamp 

Still working away on my presentation for the Apple Store in Indianapolis. Today I am taking an Indiana icon and processing an image using the iPad2.

This image was originally captured with a Nikon F series camera using Ektachrome slide film.  It was scanned into the digital world using an Imacon/Hasselblad scanner. And now the fun begins...

I downsized the image to 2500 on the long edge which gave me a final output size of 8x10 at 240DPI. One could make the the image bigger or smaller to taste.

My current work-flow is to create various blend layers using SketchmeeHD, Artista Haiku, Photstudio (2): Pencil Paint 2 and Ancient Canvas plus a sharpened layer using Perfect Photo. If you do not have the new Perfect Photo upgrade note that they have improved the sharpening dramatically - they call it sharpening but it is in reality unsharp mask and it works very very well...You can create these blend layers to taste using many different applications.

Next is the fun part in Iris for iPad for blending and masking combination's of these layers to create the look. I might take a sharp layer and blend with an oil painting soft layer to see the effect the sharp has on the soft...I use pencil paint in various combos to create the outlines in some of my images - being a amateur painter I sometimes do this on canvas to call attention to a particular part of the image. Another part of the work-flow is to convert to black and white and paitn in varios amounts of color which I used in today;s image. Filterstorm does an OK job of this and gives some good control options on your conversion. A screen shot of the dialog box is below.

The final step is local sharpening for effect and to paint back in the ancient canvas layer to the desired color you want.

 

Upcoming Events:

May 21: Apple Store, Indianapolis, Indiana - 8AM-10AM Music and iPhone Presentation
September 8-9: Renaissance Fine Art and Design Gallery - 2 day iPhone Workshop
September 10: Gallery Show opens at Renaissance Fine Art and Design Gallery, Carmel, Indiana
October 9: gallery Show opens at Gallery 20 in Toledo, Ohio -Benefit for 1Matters.org.

Old Hotel - Hudson Valley

It was raining on Sunday when I photographed this structure - need to go back this week with some better light....also need to get inside... did a good bit of post processing playing around with textures - always something new to learn...

Captured and Process using the iPhone4 and iPad2

ProHDR (5 images)
autostitch
autopainter
Sketchmee for texture
Artista Haiku for textures
Iris for blending
Photoforge for sharpening
Filterstorm for local tonality, composite work and blending

Now a bit of self promotion. I entered a PDN photo contest with one of my studio portraits. Trying to get some votes. If you have some time please click on the link below and vote for my image... thanks

http://facesphotocontest.com/bin/Rate?image_id=1009411490http://facesphotocontest.com/bin/Rate?image_id=1009411490

Dynamic Light

Yes, still working on learning 'Dynamic Light' the new application on yesterday's blog post. 

I went back into the archives and re--processed an early image (see re-processed image above) using 'Dynamic Light'. Depending on what you are looking for this application pops color and contrast and generally opens up the image - I would guess one's taste could go either way but on a personal level I can see using this for certain types of images, possibly even creating an image to blend back in with the original for effect. 

The application is simple to use with easy to understand settings, and, on the tests I have done appears to hold resolution. 

The image below was the image I re-processed in Dynamic Light. 

This application is well worth exploring further.

This image is a 27 image composite stitched together using the auto-stitch application at standard resolution.