Sage Hall in Silhouette

This image records an interesting near-silhouette view of Sage Hall, Cornell University, mid-morning sunlight. Sage Hall is a beautiful building regardless of photographic/artistic approach.

Artistic/Technical notes: high-quality silhouette photographs are attractive, but difficult for the photographer to capture.  While a "basic" silhouette (pure black against a background) can be easily captured, exposing so a very subtle amount of the object's color and structure can be seen, while retaining the sunburst or sky background, is quite difficult to do.

To accomplish this, the object was captured with multiple different-exposure shots using HDR (high-dynamic-range) techniques.  In the end, nine separate shots, varying in exposure time, were taken and later merged to create this image.

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Aladdin's Lamp

Aladdin's Lamp is a whimsical experiment gone good. The original photo was of a field of yellow grass-seed heads, bright in the mid-day sunlight. This is how the image ended up after a lot of digital post processing. I think it's a fun and interesting image.

Artistic/Technical notes: This image began as a photographic capture of golden-headed grasses in a field.  I used Photoshop to hand-create a sort of fractal image, including twisting and distorting the original image.  I then added the oval black background and the spreading rays out to the boundaries of the image.

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Stained Glass Tree

This tree began its artistic journey standing in an old orchard as it has done for years.  While a beautiful tree with full foliage, its personality really shines in the winter because of its incredible complexity of branches and twigs.

When I shot this photo I thought the tracks in the snow of children sledding in the park established a certain "brittle texture" to the image.  This gave me the idea to turn the tree into a tinkling display of stained glass shards between the branches and twigs.

Artistic/Technical notes: I modified this image significantly in Photoshop to bring out its "crisp" nature.  I then added a digital treatment to provide the multi-colored "stained glass" presentations between the branches of the subject tree and other trees in the background.

This image is displayed in my home at a framed size of about 25"x20", and never fails to get comments from our guests.

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Lone Tree Digital Gouache

This is an example of what can be done by combining a promising digital photograph with post-processing in Adobe Photoshop, and finally turning it into a digital painting using Corel Painter.

This image looks good at print sizes from 20"x14" up to 30"x24" because of its high resolution, and breezy low-contrast look.  The bigger it gets the more interesting it gets.

Artistic/Technical notes: When working with this sort of subtle, ethereal subject, one must ensure that defining details - in this case branches, leaves, ground flowers and scudding clouds - attract the viewer's eye through the use of color, contrast and texture, thereby bringing the viewer's attention to the central theme of the lone tree.

Note that the far background retains the color scheme of the tree, but is slightly blurred and therefore under-emphasized and of secondary importance to your eyes.

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Winter Ghosts

This was a shot at dusk with camera settings and post processing to emulate infrared.  The exposure was a very long one, manually controlled, and I was fortunate that there was absolutely no breeze to blur my subject.

This is what I think of as a "fun" image - one that might be a conversation starter.  I think it works best in one of the smaller sizes, e.g. 8"x12" in a 12"x16" black frame with a black mat with about 2.5"x2.5" wide rails.

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