Challenge: Can you make fine Art from this snapshot from my car?

It's tough to take a great picture, let alone a fantastic picture.

We do take many images where elements are confusing and we have to delete them or put them aside. but what happens to the spark that for a split second made one try to capture something from the scene?

I was traveling to Santa Monica to the 3rd Street Promenade and saw a woman reading a paper in the drizzle, her head protected with a plastic bag. So I rolled down the window and snapped this with my 5D and newly acquired beautiful Canon 50 1.2L:



The challenge is o look at this again in higher resolution, as if it were your own shot, (here's the file), and see what your imagination can derive from this and whether you might be able to create an artistc image.

As usual put © Photographer 2007, save the PSD in case we want to print it out and all versions are donated to © original photographer. Post your version at 600-1000 dpi in size.

The winner will get a DVD on Street Photography by Michael Reichman

Remember to give it your own Title

We'll close this after a max of 12 versions.

Asher

Hi Asher
Here is my take.
Duplicate layer, inverse, acid treatment, and various adjustment layers. I went with the flow, so too many steps to remember… PSD file saved.


Enjoy

Ivan,

i like the up beat mood and the color palette. Do you have a title?

Asher

"Headless at the Head Shop?" ;-)

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

Brilliant!

But you can't add a title to his work however informed you are by experience!

Asher

Looking for her superhero (in the classifieds section)

Here is my take, I hope you'll enjoy it. If not, I have more where it comes from ;-).

Rotate > Crop > Poster Edges > Color Balance > Copyright text > Save to Web > Save as PSD.

Looking for her superhero (in the classifieds section):



Cheers,

Asher Kelman said:

Ivan,

i like the up beat mood and the color palette. Do you have a title?

Asher

Click to expand...

Thank you Asher I am glad you liked it. .
Title...mmmm..... "Tripping"
I’ve got more version if you like me to post them.
Cem.
That’s really good work, I love it, you managed to keep her head, and everything there is readable, I was a bit… how could I say this… “Worst for wear” last night, hence my psychedelic version lol.

Ivan Garcia said:

......I was a bit… how could I say this… “Worst for wear” last night, hence my psychedelic version lol.

Click to expand...

That's far out man, heavy and outtasite! Groovy ;-) (ROTF LMAO)

Cheers,

ROFL Cem.
I didn't have anything "heavy" ...just too much wine at my dinner party...it affected my "vision"... or should I say "double" vision lol
Ps : I had another title... " At the sight of pastic-head woman...Spiderman could not help himself"

Fine art as B&W ?

I went for the black and white with sepia tone for a vintage look.

To process the photo I used Lightzone for the B&W tonal changed. Then imported into Lightroom and applied the sepia tint, and last cropped to my liking for the appropriate title.


Photo Titled: "Lois waiting for Superman"


-Brian-


©Asher Kelman

My attempt...

This is quite an impressive production of silk purses from one sow's ear...

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

Today's special offer - three for the price of one....

Nill Toulme said:

This is quite an impressive production of silk purses from one sow's ear...

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

Click to expand...

Hi Nil,

When you, yourself, take a picture of sports action, you use all your knowledge of pacing of the game, experience with the players to track the action and predict a peak or defining action. You compose in a split second. Voila, your great shots!

All you have to do now is your standard workflow at a minimum and then careful extra work when needed some times.

The field and other players are not all that irrelevant and with fairly open apertures and your experience that you have "aced" in most cases anyway. The big thing is you have to be interested and withstand back and arm ache for all the work!

However, in the case of rapid street photography, hardly anything is bound to be in your favor. You cannot choose easily as you pass a store at 30 miles per hour. The positions you choose are limited.

However, there is something that draws one in to take interest. Here it was the large poster with a picture of a face, the eclectic collection of labels and notices in the window and a woman reading a paper in the drizzle, her head protected with a plastic bag.

What was going on?

That puzzle leads to artistic openings.

Your images however are clearly understood events in a game in which all the steps and events are understood and the consequences are understood. Yes, one can do art derivatives of all your works, if you are so inspired.

However, in the street scene, one is faced with the disappointment that what seemed attractive (because one's brain ignores a lot of trash to focus interest on the girl, perhaps) and the camera, not being aware of our preferences for focus of attention, simply records the jumble of things viewable.

So the pictures are often at first disappointing! Even though some motivation inspired the shot, the essence of the questions and fascination is loften buried in a mess.

One can revisit such an image and try to find again that essence which drove the photographer to take the picture or select the image from a series of random snap shots.

One can derive interesting pictures by a number of maneuvers, some using chance and some using thought-out and an informed map of an intent to get an image that is worth looking at.

Changing the colors aimlessly may be just craftwork at first, and done without inspiration and be decorative. However, there may result certain families of possibilities from which the artist can choose elements.

The photographer might be able to crop, alter tonalities, clone, change colors and so forth, as with preparing any photograph. The idea is to remove what should not be seen and draw the eye to what one wants to show in such a way as to embed more than decoration in the image and make a print worthy of thrilling the viewer.

Your sports pictures will almost always thrill, since they record exciting human action often of people with loving friends and family.

Fast street photography requires a lot more to get anywhere near the same level of satisfaction to the artist or anyone else.

I'm particularly interested in having photographers explore files they didn't create to see how they might be stimulated to make a final image.

Yes, a lot of silk purses, but then it is not kosher to call the first shot a "sow's ear"!

Asher

No offense intended, Asher. What I bring home from a typical game shoot is the whole pig! Then I start whittling away until I'm left with only the tasty bits (still non-kosher though, alas). ;-)

My remark was actually in reflective admiration of your initial challenge. I didn't see much in the shot and didn't think it would go far. But I like what I've seen, and I like the exercise. In a way it's somewhat similar — to me at least — to what I went through with my brother's car over here.

It's also something that, frankly, intimidates me more than a little, in that my work has been almost without exception "event" type work as opposed to "fine art" work. That is, my images "capture the moment" for someone, and to the extent they are strong images with any merit standing on their own, that is purely secondary. I can imagine that portraiture can be similar, in that any competent portrait can be a compelling image for the subject and his or her loved ones, but a portrait that rises above that and becomes an image that stands on its own as a purely artistic statement is something else entirely.

But in street photography and other categories of what I consider strictly "fine art" photography, once you move beyond the snapshot phase, there's not really any safety net. The final image must stand or fall on its own merit. Scary stuff. ;-)

[/ramble]

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

And no offense felt, Nill!

I merely took the opportunity to reflect on what we are doing in this excercise and examine part of the creative process. I feel priviliged that so many talented people will stop what they are doing to devote their imagination and skill to an image that they did not initiate.

I'm trying to learn about families of creative ideas coming from one initial spark.

In the process it is stimulating and one can learn a lot about paths one did not think of taking.

This appears to be a great way of examining art outside of one's own creative limitations.

For me it is a great learning experience every time.

Asher

Well here's my own version.

Trompe l'oiel



How I imagined it.

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

Well here's my own version.

Trompe l'oiel

Asher

Click to expand...

trompe l'œil... ;-)

nice one BTW

Interesting!

Here are a few of my own observations about this work:

- The parking meter looks way too large, but after comparing, it's size has not been altered...

- The bike makes the whole picture seem as if it has wheels.

- The combo of the NO PARKING in proximit to the bike makes me think the bike has a mind of its own, and because you moved the bike seat behind the woman, it looks like it is going to hook her de-park her.

- You've managed to bring lots of intense focus to the woman and the scene around her. So much so, I begin to wonder about the significance of the numbers I see - 517 - 23

- The graphic on the bottom of the door almost looks 3D

Was this all done in Photoshop?

Thanks so much for your comments, Ed.

It's all done in Photoshop. This is a sketch for a larger picture.

When I saw the girl, in a flash I saw her and hyperfocused my mind on what she might be doing and how everything might in fact relate to her, the bicycle included.

I could not stop my car and jump out, so in a way, the bicycle is an agent of my presence.

Asher

The big file wasn't available - dead link -- so here's a quickie based on the SCREEN version

Thanks for the contribution! Do you have a title? That we we can get to what's on your mind~

Asher

No title, just trying to sketch further ideas for a picture from what's there. A title would shoehorn interpretation

What IS Fine Art?

It's a nice slightly murky color shot. Put together a portfolio of photos of the same genre, print them about 8"x12", matte them and put them in simple frames, convince a gallery to give you a show, perhaps even get a review in the arts section of your local Sunday paper, and it's fine art.

Thanks Al!

It's very tough to get galleries to look at work, one needs just the right set of pics at the right time in the life of the gallery as they have lots of work ahead with collectors wiating for these known artists work. I have laready spent a considerable amount of effort taking around one OPFer's impressive prints and while they were well regarded, there were no openings.

Still the Pat on the back is helpful! How did you react to the yellow derivative?

Asher

Stories to a passer-by

Hi Asher,

The high-resolution version had disappeared, so here is a version based on the low-res JPG screenshot you posted earlier.
I title it "Stories to a passer-by".


© Asher Kelman 2007 (post-processing by Dawid Loubser)

Interesting take.

I like the selective blur. We focus on her.

Thanks for hte contribution Dawid!

asher

We all need a Hero

Title: "Sometimes we all need a Hero"



Used a bit of artistic license to adjust the image.

Thanks for the contribution, Gary.

Maybe yours needs a a dark frame as the elongated form gets overpowered perhaps by the white of the page?

Asher

My version...

Okay, being totally honest with everybody, when I first saw this picture I thought what in the heck is Asher thinking? This is a totally worthless crap image to try and do anything with! And my appologies to you Asher, but I know you know what I mean!

Anyway, after looking at it a few times it started to grow on me and I finally got an idea about what I thought it needed to turn it into a viable street image. Here is my rendition, titled A Day In The Life...-- and yes, The Beatles were playing in the background while I processed it :



Cheers,