Lost Aussie on the loose

Fluff and Nothing

Ever have one of those days when you tweak and twiddle and nothing seems to be "just right"?

Well today was one of those days. I worked on several images and the ideas and concepts were there but nothing gelled quite the way I wanted to ..... so pooooof .... off into rubbish they went.  Hours of work dissolved in the crinkle of the right click, move to trash icon.

At 7pm I was forced to shut down all the technologies as we started to be battered by massive thunder storms, non-stop lightening strikes and a deluge of rain.  My rain gauge outside (aka empty flower pot) reckoned on about 3".

At 9pm, a brief lull in the storm sent DH and I out in search of some dinner and we tried a new pub, barely a few minutes away, which was a good thing as flash flooding had many of the roads here abouts totally impassable.
After a few pints of stellar NC brewed beer and some tasty "fixin's" (see I am learning the southern lingo!) we snagged another lull in the storm and made it home with only a few raindrops for decoration.

I did brave a little more editing after dinner... perhaps the beer and delicious spinach and artichoke dip helped?  the PG version of one of my recent Art Nudes is above and if you are brave and not particularly uptight or naked people phobic, you can see the full version on Pixoto. 

NOTE though... please don't go and look at the image on Pixoto and then write and tell me you are offended.  I had some woman write last week demanding that I remove my link to one of my fine art nudes from my FB page.  It's a link,  you click on it, you dont like it you close it.  End of story.  It was INCREDIBLY easy to remove her from my Friends list!!

 

Life Lakey V5

 
In the few months that we have been living on the Lake the sunset seems to have moved across the horizon significantly.  I am sure there are better students of solar/planetary behaviour than me who can explain this phenomenon because I guess the sun always sets in the West.... and that don't move!

Regardless, the evening views across the lake are always quite amazing.

New Creative Bits...

DH is away this week for work and on the nightly phone call this evening there was "hello, how are you?" which was immediately followed by " where's the blog post for yesterday and why is there no new art posted ?"........

Hmmm like one makes art like one washes the clothes or vacuums the floors? .. On demand?

Fortunately for me, (or for him, I'm not sure)? ... there was some new work in the wings....

"Racing For The Edge "
© Marie Otero 2013

 Another piece of Surrealism .... Sailboat off the beach at Mullaloo, dolphin and a whale tail from off the coast of Perth, coupled with skies off Jones Beach on Long Island.

And then there's a bit of pseudo fantasy art, created using one of the images shot from the Belly Dancer event...

"Forrest Dance"
© Marie Otero 2013

Is that enough to garner my "productive" points for the day?  I can throw in a few hours of weeding in the garden and and hour swimming laps at the pool if I need to....and let's not get onto the subject of laundry OR vacuuming floors!

Mae Klong Train Market - Thailand

Sifting through my photos of Thailand tonight and I've inumerable ones of the market at Mae Klong, where the train track run right through the middle of the market, within inches of everything and everyone ... absolutely fascintating.
Vendors just pullup the shades and slide produce mounted on bars, out of the way of the train as it rolls by then minutes or seconds later, it's all back to business as usual.

There's a cool YouTube Video of it here

The train terminates at the station just adjacent to the market, so it's not going very fast, 4-6mph at best and it's obviously a way of life that the locals are used to...

 

Some Meetup Belly Wiggles

Today I joined in with one of my new Charlotte Meetup Photography Groups to take pix of Belly Dancers.  It was my first time working with this crowd and hopefully not the last as it took a little while to get hold of the vibe of the group and figure out how they work.

I have my doubts that the models do too much work as Belly Dancers (for real) and possibly prefer just to wear the costumes and have fun with it.  Regardless, they were a nice crowd and there is always something new to be learned from a different environment and seeing how other photog's do their stuff.

My fave pix were the ones that were not necessarily technically correct in any way, shape or form but we were just having fun messing with the strobe lights and dragging the shutter for up to a second or more, so you get one crisp image from the flash event and light added into the capture for as long as the shutter stays open and at the same time you deliberately move the camera to capture more movement.

Some really interesting and very creative images were shot by doing this and these are probably the ones that will end up finding their way into some piece of "altered reality" in the not too distant future....as I really like the ghosting and ethereal effects that turned up, especially after a bit of tweaking in Camera RAW.

Reflecting On Things

I spent a fair amount of time today helping a friend figure out how to make effective reflections in Photoshop and it rather got me thinking about some new ways to interpret some of the model shots I garnered in Perth last month.

The reflection part is not too hard, copy paste, flip vertical, add some motion blur and add a displacement map to give the reflection an authentic "wobble", but the darned thing looked a bit boring so, I added a huge flourish of red across the canvas, modified it with the warp tool and added a bit more motion blur for good luck and lo you have a streaming ribbon which has been gently masked away.

Much better, or well, at least a little more interesting than the SOOC image on the right!

I never really tire of tweaking and fiddling in Photoshop.  The results are not always particularly replicable and to that end I suppose I should make better notes or create actions to mimic what I do... but for me the spontaneity is half the fun!

Here's wishing you all Happy Summer Solstice and a good Weekend!

The Love and Hate - the Adobe Thing

It's hard to believe that Photoshop "14" is here  (aka CS7) ... under the guise of the Creative Cloud.

I've subscribed to the Creative Cloud since it's inception and have done Beta testing for Adobe for some years now and categorically I love their product..... but ...... yes there's a but.....

Why is it that each time there is a major upgrade in their programs do I have to go through the painful process of installing all my third party plug-ins all over again?  Surely there must be a work around for this time consuming and hellish adventure?

Im pretty pedantic about keeping records and serial numbers but really ....? having to go through the installation process each time there is a new version of Photoshop seems to me to be quite ridicuous!!

Hello Adobe .... can you hear me? .... and thousands of others????  Let's sort out the plug-in issue please, at least in lieu of smart sharpening and sundry other paltry improvements!!

"Converse"ly - Altered Sneaker Speaking

Recently I came across an image on Deviant Art of a Converse sneaker mired on the beach... it sparked off a light bulb moment as I had happened to snap pix of my #2 Son's Converse sneakers when we were setting up the lighting for the model shoot a few weeks ago in Perth.
I had fun with the inspiration image and came up with my own take ....

Given my current penchant for using my own photos and eschewing the use of stock imagery to create my digital work, here are the pix I used to concoct "The Pelican Collector"

I used the 3D modelling tools in CS6 Extended to transform one of the sneakers into the shape and persepective that I wanted.  I also took pix of some extra sneaker laces to create the fall out ones from eyelets at the top of the shoe, as apparently #2 son tucks his in!  They were judiciously altered using the warp and liquefy tool.
I made brushes from the waves to add authentic cloning to the boot to seat it in the water and a judicious amount of dodging and burning of all the layer to add depth and dimension.

Kind of fun..... I hope you like it....

Rodeo - Country Style

As we are want to do, DH and I headed out today for some weekend adventure, cameras in hand. 
Initially we had planned to go Bluegrass (music) hunting but since I really wanted to get some pics of a Rodeo and the two events were in rather different directions, we settled for a bit of a visit to Black Mountain for lunch before making our way to the Rodeo at Pinto Acres.

We arrived rather early at the Rodeo site and the large looming field and empty bleachers set me wondering as to whether we had made a good choice or not. However within 45 minutes the place was packed!  Trucks and trailers arriving in droves.  Horses, cattle, cowboys and cowgirls forming a merry throng.

Around 6:45 the opening ceremonies got underway and from there on in for a goodly number of hours we were treated to horsey and cow capers....

I've only been to two other Rodeos before, long long time ago in Houston and much bigger events than this.  The good thing about this event was that there were no particular rules or restrictions about where you could wander, no-one minded if you were poking your uber large zoom lens through the fence and by all accounts most folk found it interesting that some-one would bother to come by and take pictures of what they were doing....

We got to watch "Chute Dogging", where you wrestle steers from standing down to the ground, Calf Roping, where Um, yes, they rope the cattle, setting the steer out from a cute, one rider knobbles the head and another rider ropes the feet.... and Barrel Racing, where the rider must circle the barrels in a clover leaf pattern at a hell bent pace, with a mad dash to the finish...
The fast tight turns around the barrels are phenomenal and in the bottom shot I was THAT close to the turn that I garnered a mouthful of dirt to boot!!!

All in all a very fun and very "Carolina" day out....

Life Lakely V4

It's been a while since I posted a pic of the "Lake" ... but tonight's crescent moon, sundry stars and aeroplanes and the dashing about of late night boats on the water were too pretty to miss.

I shot this at ISO 400, f9 @ 1m 15 secs in bulb mode.  I had to up the ISO to shorten the exposure time as I did not realise just "quite" how fast the moon moves!

I like taking long exposure night photos, but as with everything, there's a bit of a learning curve to get it just right.