Entry 16: Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards

I was all over the place this month (parts of Southern California actually).  I took a few hundred photos mostly of places I would like to shoot with models for my model pages.  I do that because it is fun and good therapy.  But I need to find something to do with my camera that pays money because I am not independently wealthy though.  I am not dependently wealthy either.  Yeah, so I took a bunch of photos and I will show you some but I am going to show you something else in this posting.  I took these back in late August 2010 after I had finish doing that celebrity gifting gig.  Well, let me just get the photos up – these were ‘drive by’ photos on Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards of people.  I like doing these kinds of shots – snapshots of life if you will.  And I was playing with Photoshop too.

Nothing special here except for smudging the license plate.  I shot all of these with my Canon PowerShot S5 IS.  You cannot get one of these cameras anymore.  Well, you cannot get one new.  You can get a Canon PowerShot SX30 IS.  More mega pixels, greater optical zoom, better video, and so on.  No hot shoe for an external flash though.  Still, if I had more money, I would add it to my point and shoot collection.  Oh, just because I was hiding under a rock for some time I know that there may be one other person doing the same who just came out and started reading something and it was this blog.  The “IS” at the end of those camera names stands for “image stabilization”.  For us shaky hands people in the world.

I did no Photoshop here either.  I just liked how I captured this moment in time.  Wait a second.  I did do “Photoshop” on every photo – the watermark.  Outside of that, nothing else was done to this photograph.  Do you know any of these people?  Neither do I but they have been forever immortalized here on my blog.

In this shot, I layered the picture.  It’s all the same photo but I cut out the two guys and then pasted them over the original photo that I rasterized (I think) and watermarked.  You see the watermark is underneath the waiter.  I just started doing the watermark that way but I think it looks cool.  It looks like how they do some magazine covers.

Here an elderly couple is crossing the street while I am waiting at the light.  I catch them between the cars and snap them up.  Same deal, I copied the couple from the original shot then layered them on top of the original shot.  I did something to the original shot (color/contrast/saturation) but I do not remember what.  That is not important.  What is important that you can do all sorts of stuff with Photoshop, you just have to take the timer to learn the software’s capabilities.  Same on the watermark, I layered it between my cut out and the main photograph.

This is my homage to the artist Romare Bearden. I left the original photo alone.  I rasterized, or something, my cutouts.  This time the cutouts were on the bottom and the original photograph on top.  The original photo has “holes” it in so you can see the changed photo beneath it.  It looks collage like, though it is a kind of reverse collage.  Just the same, it is collage looking in the Bearden fashion, kind of.  This is my favorite shot of the bunch.

In this shot, the whole photo got the effect.  It looks cool (at least to me it does).  I like the girl on her phone – she is oblivious to the world around her.  Like my ten-year-old when she is on her phone.

I did not alter this shot save for scribbling over the license plate and the watermark.  It is the same photo as the one before but I panned out (wide angle?) for this shot.  I photographed different people because I cannot stop the goings and comings of anyone but you still see the girl on her phone.  It is as if the world outside of her smart phone does not exist.

This last photograph is like the one up close with cell phone girl.  I did the effect to the whole photo – no cutouts.  I think the effect is colored pencils.  It’s cool, I like it.

Well, that is it for this round, ladies and gents.  We will try this again soon.  And thank you again for being my best blog buddy, Anita!

Entry 15: The dichotomy of Jeanilee

Hey blog world!  Where have I been?  Who knows just as long as I came back.  On to the subject at hand, Jeanilee.  Well, I do not know if dichotomy would be the right word because she is not necessarily living an “alternative” life, this is just part of who she is.  But dichotomy is a cool word and I like using it even when it does not really fit.  Again, onto the photos because this is a photography blog – not a word blog.  The photos outside are from our, Jeanilee and I, first shoot together back in October of 2010.  We were in some park taking photos and I never knew how much danger I was in.  She could have attacked me and choked me out then ran off with my camera.  Good thing she does not routinely do those things to unsuspecting photographers.  The photos from the gym are from our most recent photo shoot on the 26 of last month.  “Our” meaning she was in the gym training when I was photographing.  I wrote an article about her gym, 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu in Riverside, on examiner.com too.  Nevertheless, I just wanted to show how you cannot “judge a book by its cover” because you just might find yourself caught up in a “naked choke” with the sleepies fast approaching.  That Jiu-Jitsu stuff is no joke.  The gym photos are of some actual training going on in the gym.  Jeanilee should be easy to spot; she is the only female in her class.  Cool.  You take a look and see for yourself.

 

 

 

 

Well, that is it for this time.  I will be back with more shots later.