Look Closer

Just in case you were curious about my blog header, here is a bit of background about it. Background being the key word here…

I shot the overall image of my desk with my Sony Ericsson W810i 2 mega pixel cell phone camera. I used existing light coming in from the room window to light the scene. The key to a successful shot is understanding how your camera captures light. (Afterall, that is what a camera does.) This is only comes from shooting a lot of pictures and analyzing them. Thankfully with digital technology, film is free, and you can almost instantly study your results.

Then there is Photoshop. I am currently using the CS version which is adequate for my imaging needs. I used it to balance the levels in my pictures. This serves to bring out color and highlights of my shots amongst other things. In addition, I only used three other aspects of this software to blend images in this composition. These are: Layer Gradient masks, Overlay Layer Blending, and Screen Layer Blending. (You can conduct a search on Google to see just how powerful these tools are.)

In the final composite you’ll see aspects of everything that I like and aspire to be. I’ll leave it to you to figure them out out. But here are a few freebies: that is the 23rd Psalm that is blended in over the whole image, can you see the second girl's face (?) and the Kanji symbols do have spiritual meanings as well. Take a closer look and let me know what you see.

The image is slowly evolving from week to week much like I feel we all must do as life continues. Some changes may be obvious, others subtle.

One.

p.s. Blogspot tends to overcompress and soften an image to make it fit. For a high quality image file just ask me!