Going beyond "just pics"

I'm on a mission to move beyond just pictures and traditional media, so continuing to build my photoshop skills and excited to see others have an interest in commissioning my work.

Zentangle

Inspired by Visionaries and Voices and Neil Dignan, so took a shot at a zentangle while sick with a cold.

Worlds!

Yesterday, my daughter's hip hop team accepted their bid to the Hip Hop World Dance competition in Disney World, so I made this to commemorate it.

Hip Hop Photomanipulation

More experimentation turned into some pretty decent photo-manipulations.  

This one was a mixture of text, two layers of one black, one white mask using splatter brush.  Lowest layer was on a liquified layer where I stretched out the photo.  Finished it off with a zoom blur effect.

This one was a mix of angle and radial gradients, star brushes and a randomly masked set of radial lines created with the line tool and rotated.

Cheer and Dance - Lotsa photos

So i spent the last 2 days taking over 650 pictures at my daughters cheer and dance competition.  I had the privilege of an all access pass giving me the ability to get closer to the action and during warm-ups.  Below are 3 collages providing a sampling of the pics.

Jennifer Lawrence - as a Cyborg

Spent some time today getting more experience with Photoshop CC.  I transformed Jennifer Lawrence into a cyborg using a nice tutorial in Advanced Photoshop Premium collection Volume 7 (Oliver Wetter www.fantasio.info).  While I didn't follow it exactly, I did implement most of the techniques and used the background provided by Oliver.

Link to the final image here.

Boiling Water to Instant Ice

So, it's -7 degrees F here in Mason, OH and I've always wanted to try this.  Take boiling (or very hot water) and throw it in the air and watch it rain ice crystals.  Used timer and mounted flash to get this one before I froze to death.  :)

Colored Pencil Macro Photos

Been sick for the last few days so decided to spend some time with the camera and the macro lens kit.  I don't have the money to spend on a dedicated macro lens, so purchased a set of lens "filters" which simply magnify my prime lens.  These were all taken with a Nikon D3100 and a Nikon 50mm prime lens.

You can view higher resolution versions of these on my Flickr site.

Time to Restart the Blog

It's a new year, so thought it would be a good time to re-establish the blog.  I hope to devote most of the posts to sketches (drawings) and photography and I've added links to my Flickr site in the Links section of this site.

More to come...