cars cars cars and a little lomo to make them stand out more

Its no secret I love cars. Since I got on the Lomography wagon and experimenting I decided to grab a couple of car shots and use the process to highlight the cars and create a little excitement around them. The 2008 Mustang Bullitt and 2011BMW 6 series were the car shots I worked with.

A little more lomography for the morning

Still in the lomography frame of mind. Have just about got the process down where I can do the steps without thinking about it too hard. Soon enough I'll be able to just do it and focus on creating impressionistic images from a hi-fi digital with no effort at all. Still will be a bit time consuming but it won't be brain wracking.

Enjoy "Forgotten Path" and "Woodland Spring". The latter I like the image regardless if its impressionistic or realism...well worth the poison oak exposure to capture the image.

playing in the Lomo sandbox a bit...

A few things I'm slowly discovering. My love of dramatic cloud filled skies don't work so well in the Lomo world unless you are willing to give up on some of the vignetting in the sky. What does work best is when you have a solid sky, or a pretty much uniform background.

These three images were done today. Still have the tutorial playing in the back to guide me through the steps as they just aren't down to memory and automatic. I don't have to pause any longer while I do the steps, its just a matter of committing them all to memory. To save you the scroll the link to the tutorial is HERE.

Personally for me the Spring Bouquet worked the best of the series I worked today. The Palms loses some of the vignette in the upper right corner because of the clouds and isn't quite as effective. Similar problem with Santa Ynez Valley...edge vignetting isn't as strong in the sky as I would like.

Much to learn still but am glad I took the tutorial as it helps me better understand CS5's potential better than I had before I took it.

still on the lomo path

I love learning new things. Since stumbling upon a tutorial on Lomo have been just a bit energized with the tidbits I am learning on CS5 as well as producing Lomo style images.

In this case the Lomo process really makes it possible to allow the center to better highlight the single tree and bridge while blowing out details in the fringe. Makes it possible to give a sense of space via the negative energy on the perimeter.

I still need to learn to take a deft hand at the sharpening and unsharpening part of the process to better transition between the two. This is just a start.

Of course the learning to better control masks and adding grain has me thinking again about what I can do to make "autochrome" style images better in CS5 as well. Stay tuned for more on both counts as I meander down the impressionists path a little stronger in the coming weeks.

A meander into the world of Lomo

Where to start. The last month or so has been spent looking into "lomography" or "lomo" for short, which produces some pretty startling impressionistic images. Many elements go into the images. First the cameras are bests described as "toy cameras" for film, yes that silver based stuff I adore still after all these years. Second they take the old outdated film for the most part that has inherent color shifts built into it. Then they cross process it...IE negative film developed in slide film chemicals or vice versa.

The end result is multi-fold shifts in the image compared to what would have happened if you were using quality optics, optimal age film and correct processing. In short its nothing like you shot and its image quality is adorable. The edges are out of focus and the light transmitted drops noticeably. The colors shift with a pronounced blue/green shift. Highlights get blown out and darks just lose all detail. Sharpness suffers at the edges with grain appearing all over adding to the impressionistic feel.

Since I'm not about to shift all of my work to film for the odd lomo image I would want to create I looked to Adobe's photoshop to help me create the look and feel of a lomo image. After fooling around with it I just couldn't get the right result on my own. I wound up starting to google search ways to create it via tutorial so I don't have to reinvent the world. I stumbled upon this excellent tutorial that takes you through the multitude of steps needed to create a lomo style image in photoshop. It is on YouTube and its possible to pause the video between steps so you can work out an image of your own.

The image here is one I purposely shot to try to lomoize. It was successful to a great degree. In the future I need to keep in mind that high contrast scenes will work best with the process. The potential for this process to work with a variety of images is pretty terrific. Of course you need to have a strong image to start with as no amount of photoshop trickery will solve bad composition and exposure.