[Relatively cheerful street preacher at the Jazz Fest in San Jose.]
This week for whatever reason I’ve been listening to Al Jourgensen and Ministry’s 1991 song “Jesus Built my Hotrod”. The audio “Red Line/White Line? is the longest, but the video version is quite substantial. The sound of a passing race car is in some ways like a industrial-metal riff. The vocals are performed by Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. “Where you’re goin’ don’t matter because it weren’t never there.”
I’m still working on the beach picture that I started near Davenport with Vernon last week. I posted draft 1 of the picture a few days ago, and today I finished to draft 2. It’ll take two more layers, I think. to nail it. For one thing, I want some little aliens hanging onto the saucer for dear life. And I might change the color of the rock behind the guy yet again so that he pops out better, or maybe I’ll put a halo around him. Not sure of the the title. “Roman UFO” “Nudists Capture Flying Saucer” “Classical Painting with UFO.”
I like how the figures are coming out, they remind me a little of the figures in the paintings of M. Louise Stanley, a really great SF Bay Area artist.
We went to the Jazz Fest in San Jose yesterday, it was fun to see people downtown. They had a lot of stages, with one of the stages actually inside the Fairmont Hotel, where I was at the World Fantasy Con last Halloween. We saw the Pete Yellin quintet, they played great, some Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker songs as well as originals.
Another standout was Mia Borders up from New Orleans with her band. If you go to her site, you can hear her great songs off her new album Magnolia Blue. And here’s my picture of her above with, I think, her bassist Pablo Gonzalez.
It’s always nice to get into the street outside the AC hotel, into the August city street. Rock on, Mia, tear it up!
August 16th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Rock the tonemapping, Rudy! You are tonemapping the RAWs from your S90, right?
(I can’t wait for cameras based on Mantis Shrip eyes. One day.)
Also, I love the guy’s expression. I can just imagine their conversation:
He’s like “Aww man, is that right? How about over here?” Ugh, it’s heavy, “How about here?”
And she’s like “No, wait, stop, you just had it.” Ugh, he’s cute, but not very bright.
August 17th, 2010 at 7:58 am
Thanks, kleer001. Yes, I do a lot of tone mapping in the sense of manipulating the light and shadow, and sometimes the color. I adjust pretty much every single photo these days.
Right now I’m using high-def JPGs off my S90, and editing them in PhotoShop. I crop of course. I use the Exposure dialog a lot these days, and often go back to good old Shadow/Highlight. Sometimes this kicks the color intensity up too high, and then I might do a touch of desaturation via Hue/Saturation. Now and then I’ll use the Dodge tool on a dark face, or the Clone Stamp to cover up distracting details. If the image is fuzzy, I might go to the Smart Sharpen filter. Sometimes I fix perspective with the Lens Distortion filter. To liven up a dull shot I might put the Glowing Edges filter on part of it, like I did with the hotel mirror picture today.
I do shoot RAW with my 5D for the more formal and archival pictures of my paintings, and edit them in the Camera Raw component of PhotoShop, but Camera Raw is a little kludgy for mass use on all my photos. I plan soon to get the Adobe Light Room ware, which makes it easier to edit RAW. I really need to do that soon, as I’d like to switch to a default of RAW for my S90 as well, I have a feeling it will clear up the images another notch. My pro photographer nephew Embry Rucker http://www.embryrucker.com shoots all RAW, and processes the pictures really fast in Light Room.