STYLIZING PHOTOS

i spent this past weekend in rexburg, idaho working on some rental properties that my parents own. it was good to do some physical labor and to see my parents and sister. i stopped along side the road on the drive back to logan and decided to take a few photos. i was inspired by the combination of colors i saw on the countryside.

i had this antique fan in the back of my car so i pulled it out and decided to take a self portrait with my digital camera. after a few attempts at setting the camera timer and then running into position i snapped this one which i liked the most.



i needed to crop it so i opened it up in photoshop. i was just playing around but one or two tweaks turned into many and i came up with a few different versions of the photo.

let me know which one you like best.


the effects on this one are subtle but i used gaussian blur to try to give the photo more of a in-focus/out-of-focus look. i am not sure but i think this might be called short depth of field. (maybe christy can comment on this). i also bumped up the saturation of the yellow weeds a little.


i tried to give this one a black and white film like quality. i used the same blur effects for depth of field but i also blew out the levels so that it would have high contrast. obviously i got rid of all the saturation as well. then i added noise to different areas of the photo to emulate film grain.


this last variation is kind of inspired by christy's photos taken with her holga camera. i subdued the saturation and added reds to the midtones to give it more summery/poloroid type of tones. then i created a few vertical blocks of varying saturation on top of that to give it that cool misaligned frame effect that you get with holgas.