• Please use real names.

    Greetings to all who have registered to OPF and those guests taking a look around. Please use real names. Registrations with fictitious names will not be processed. REAL NAMES ONLY will be processed

    Firstname Lastname

    Register

    We are a courteous and supportive community. No need to hide behind an alia. If you have a genuine need for privacy/secrecy then let me know!
  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

Ancient

....we were completly engulfed by the magic of this place.... sun and wind in our face, the tide gently breaking on the rocks... we had some lunch sitting on the rocks observing dolphins playing in the bay.... I hear children laughing.... but there were no children....beautiful flowers grow on ancient rocks.... feelings of content and happiness.... I am thinking.... if I had to die now, I would not complain....

dfde0f329eddb2713eabae5d0e621ec06g.jpg
 

nicolas claris

OPF Co-founder/Administrator
Hi Georg
this is a really amazing piece of art!

I also like that it is within your style… one cannot be wrong, this is a real typical (in all good meanings) Georg Baumann photograph.

One issue though:
This shouldn't be called "Ancient" but "Forever".

But who am I to comment like this your title?
 
I was pondering wether to post it in the art section or not. At the end of the day, it is a lot of photoshop and filters that I used to get that look, and I was thinking... So why the Hell should this be art?.... then I realised, when I took this picture, in normal daylight of course, I had this feeling about the place and the rocks, and when I started to work on it, I tried to get this across, until all of the sudden it was there, and I looked at it and said to myself, yeah, that's how it felt.

A difficult task to translate an emotion into a 2 dimensional medium, a print, and to use all tools at disposal to help that translation process.

Yeah, well, I agree, it is art then. LOL ;)
 
This is wonderful! How did you do the coloring? Also very contrasty...can you explain your post work and some EXIF?


LOL, no I can not.

Often I work intuitively, means I just use the masks, layers, filters, plugins etc. and try and try and try until I get to where I want it to be, it is not nessecarily a process that I would call a workflow, other may be than the usual stuff like denoising etc.

A little like free improvisation in music if you will.

So in that case, once I was happy with it, I just compressed it for the web and then left photoshop without saving the PSD, something I do quite often. See, I am not printing at the moment, once I started that, this will change and I will always safe the PSD files.
 
Hi George,

I too am intrigued by this photo and its post processing. Like Shane Canfield, I would like to know how and why you did it. If that is not possible, can you tell us about the process that brought you to this result. For example, did you make B+W images? If so, what did you find lacking? Was it a concsious process that led to the golden-brown treatment? Is there some physchological reason for the use of these colors?

-Nat
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Yes,

This certainly belongs in Photography as Art for both technical and esthetic reasons. But for now, kudos! I'm impressed and to prove that, I'll return. Meanwhile this picture will be going through room to room in my mind being introduced to everyone there, LOL!

Asher
 
Last edited:

Kathy Rappaport

pro member
G..
Why are you NOT printing at the moment...this deserves to be printed BIG and relished. There is a spirit in this work....thank you for sharing it here.
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Hi Bear,

I join the positive comments before me wholeheartedly, it is definitely art IMO. :)
BTW, I see some posterization in the sky, is it due to the small jpg I was wondering?

Cheers,
 
Good morning Ladies and Gents :)

Glad you like the attempt!

Yes it can be improved of course, different crop, cutting a little more on the left side, placing the title centered etc. ahem LOL It is work in progress by all standards. But the direction and the intention was clear enough already to be worth posting it in my book.

Yes there is posterisation, and I do not intend to post print perfect pictures on a public forum.

Why I did it Nathaniel? That's a good question!

Always for the same reason, if I succeed to bring a fraction of what I see in my reality into a picture, then more than likely the observer will stop for a second and start thinking, or wondering, something like that.

May be they just wonder about technical aspects of the picture, this would mean less to me personally, but may be they start wondering about the place, and eventually start looking at their own place in a slightly different way, this would mean the world to me.

See, in our western civilized world, we are taught that a stone is a stone, it has minerals to be exploited. Geophysical and Geomorphological science can explain us something about it, so I could tell you it is a Metamorphit, a sediment Rock that changed under Heat and pressure in the oligocene - miocene age (tertiary period), and many more of those things I could tell about this rock, but I don't want to bore you with that, it means nothing at the end.

But is there something else, not really isn't it? At least this is what "we" are taught, right?

See, and here it gets very personal and complicated to explain, to me this rock has so much more than "only" the science behind it. To me this rock is alive, it is a living being in deed, and while this is not in accordance with modern definitions of what constitutes life, it is to me, and it has what I call a "spirit", and it is this very spirit that "talks" to me, or it does not, but when it does, something touches me and I try to capture this and later try to work that out as I did here.

I know, sounds all like esoteric Bullcrap, but it is not to me, in fact I have no tolerance for those esoteric loopers who normally just exploit a multitude of cultures, mix belief systems and cultural insights together in a large bowl and sell it as spiritualism. I have no time for such in deed!

However, I have some strong connections into the world of native american cultures, and when I say connections by that I mean I learned from them while I lived there, in deed I learned a lot, and it has influenced my ways of looking at this world around me forever. This is why I say a rock has a spirit as has every other living being around us, a tree, as much as a bear or an eagle, they all have spirit.

As for processing, as I said, I am sorry, but this was done intuitively with no regards to a re producable workflow.

Pheeeew, not sure if that makes sense to you, and in deed it is really most difficult to explain that in such an insufficient media like the Internet, and I can only give you an idea about it. But yeah, essentially thats why I did it, because this particular rock "talked" to me, and it is not a special thing, everyone can hear that in deed, you just have to listen, and you have to be there with an open heart, that's the most important.

P.S.
@Kathy, LOL, No printer as of yet, thats the only reason. :)
 

Michael Fontana

pro member
Hi George

I like the abstraction in it; makes me rather thinking about a animal, than rocks.

Yes, rocks have life, I can tell, but not really easy to show it in a pict!
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
....Yes there is posterisation, and I do not intend to post print perfect pictures on a public forum.
..
Hi Georg,

I hope I did not "offend" you unknowingly by inquiring into the posterization issue. My question was just that, nothing hidden behind it.

You see, I now have heard for the first time from you that posterization has been intentionally introduced rather than being an unwanted byproduct of post processing. This is then in order to prevent a potential theft of your images. If that is the reason, I beg to differ slightly in my opinion. The size of the posted image (1003x768 pixels) is too small anyway to get any decent prints out of it (i.e. anything larger than 4x6 inch). But if you want to prevent even the 4x6 option, then you can do a couple of things:
a- you can post even smaller pictures, and/or
b- you can overlay the image with a watermark
What will not make a difference to a potential thief, in this very example, is the slight posterization present. If they succumb to this lowly crime, I am willing to bet that they won't even see it or be bothered by it.

Just my Euro 0.02 (which is more worth than $ 0.02 BTW; LOL)
 
Top