Butterfly in the Sky
"Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high"...
Those are the lyrics that start off the theme song for the TV show Reading Rainbow. I used to watch that show as a kid. It's a really good show - it opens your mind and eyes to our world by exploring many different and fascinating things.
If it's still on TV and you have children; I'd highly recommend allowing them to watch this.
As for the image, it was taken at a children's activity centre close to where I live. Gengling and I were heading back home from going out taking a look at photographic equipment with her friend Samantha when we passed by the centre; we noticed the doors were opened and saw people inside so we decided to go in and take a look for ourselves. There were people with their kids doing origami, there were other parents watching on while their children were taking dancing lessons... we also saw a big room with kids rollerblading. Lots of activity going on in that place!
I added in the sun to this image using the lens flare filter from Photoshop (and of course I also played around with the saturation of the image).
Lastly, this is actually cropped from a larger photo - maybe I'll post the original photo later.
UPDATE: Here is the original photo the above image is based off of:
Boulevard
Continuing along the same theme (see
Taking Another Look At Old Photos) - I've created another image that resembles a watercolour painting.
The original photo this watercolour-style image is based off of:
The photo was taken on a street in Shanghai, Pudong New District near where I currently live. You may not be able to tell from the photo but that day was extremely hot and hazy! The greyish blurriness in the background is the haze.
Taking Another Look At Old Photos
If you have some photos that you have previously taken, you can take another look at them and present them in a new way.
For example, some of you may recognize the image below as the giraffe that I used in my
Beyond the Edge posting. It's not the exact same photo but from a series of photos that was taken of the giraffe at the Toronto Zoo.
What I've done here is to present this as a sort of watercolour painting. The original photo itself seemed interesting with the giraffe but I felt it was missing something; presenting it as a watercolour seems to fill that missing gap.
So, photos that don't seem as appealing suddenly spring to life.
I will revisit this post and update it with the technique that I used to create it.
Auto Show Flowers
I went back to an image that I worked on previously (in the
Auto Shanghai 2007 pt.2 post).
I adjusted the levels in Photoshop to give the image more of a 'pop' to it. The result is the image below, followed by the previous image from the earlier posting:
I need to remember to try to bring out the details by enriching the shadows and highlights (or at least give the appearance of it being more detailed) - to give more contrast for the eyes to focus on.
Which one do you think has more 'snap' to the images?
Update: Decided to try with the other images from the auto show.
Levels adjusted:
Original:
Levels adjusted:
Original:
Night Hawk
If you've seen my previous posts:
Evening Over the Plains and
Evening Moonscape; I think you can say there's a theme developing here. I would venture to say that the theme involves the evening or night time and silhouettes.
You will need to click on the above image for the full size view (some details are lost in this smaller thumbnail image above).
Evening Over the Plains
I've continued with the silhouette theme... in fact, you can see that the moon is the same one used in the earlier posting (
Evening Moonscape). I've used Photoshop brushes from The Luna Regina website to help create this piece.
Hope you will enjoy it. Comments welcomed.
I've updated the image (shown below); can you see the differences? The changes, I believe, are very subtle - I changed the colour of some of the bamboo (should now be all black).
Click on either images to display a larger view.
Evening Moonscape
This evening moonscape image was entirely created within Photoshop. I read through a tutorial earlier and decided to try out the ideas. The steps basically consist of the following:
- create a gradient background with the darker/lighter colour on top
- create some clouds/atmosphere with the smudge and eraser tools
- create the silhouettes
- create the moon
Auto Shanghai 2007 (pt. 2)
Here is the follow-up to my earlier post:
Auto Shanghai 2007. I'll keep updating this post with more images from the show. Click on any of the images for a larger view.
Update: I've replaced some images with their touched up counterparts. See Auto Show Flowers post to view the originals
