Sometimes a Guy just can't Quit

I made this rather mundane photo of the old homestead at Berry Springs Park near Georgetown, Texas. 

Ordinarily I would just chalk this one up as a lost cause but this time I thought it might be interesting to turn it into a night photo, so I made adjustments in Photoshop to make it look like a night shot. Then I thought I should do some digital restoration and add some light to make it look lived in.

Light may make it look lived in but furniture and pictures on the wall seemed like a good idea to really make it look like someone lived there. I decided that the furniture should be something that would be found in an old homestead and decided that everything should be wood and the light source should be an old kerosene lamp. In keeping with the era, the photos on the wall needed to be in black and white. I took a couple of my photos, converted them to black and white and put them on the wall. The one in the room with the lamp is actually a photo of the homestead I made from the back.

To make it a bit more “rural”, I decided to add an old wagon wheel from photo I made in west Texas. Then I decided to dress up one of the windows by adding an image of a skylight window I made at the courthouse in Waco. I thought I was done but as I was going through some other photos, I thought I should add an old truck that I photographed in Walburg, Texas. I processed that photo to fit in. The problem though is that this 1958 Chevy truck wasn’t around in the early days of this homestead. I got to thinking that in west Texas, there are still a lot of ranch houses without water and electricity so the truck would fit.

At one point, I put a moon in the sky but it was too bright and actually detracted from the image, so I took it out.

Below is the final image. Is this really the final? I don't know. I thought I had a final before I added the truck. It could be the final, but never say never.

270 Degree View

When we visited Big Bend National Park in west Texas, I found this old panel truck near Terlinqua.

I struggled with how to make an interesting photo of this subject. The sun was high, the sky was clear and I couldn’t come up with a way to turn it into an interesting photo, so I made shots from different positions all around it. In my post processing, I tried many different approaches but found nothing that I liked. As I thought about what to do that would be creative, I thought of Picasso who showed the front and side view in the same painting. With that in mind, I set out to combine images of the side and front of this truck into a single image. I was so pleased with the result that I decided to include the rear of the truck. Ultimately I produced a 270 degree view of the truck in a single image. While I was doing all my photoshopping, I decided to replace the sky with something a little more interesting.

Here’s the final result.

"Killing Time"

I recently joined a photography club. The club's “creative” special interest group issued a monthly challenge with the subject “clocks”.  I had only a couple of days to meet the challenge if I was to show an image at the SIG meeting. I really didn’t know how to make a creative photo of a clock so I decided to start by making a photo of a clock we had on the wall. It was a traditional clock with traditional numbers that we had purchased at Wal-mart for less than five dollars. Clearly, I couldn’t make a creative image of that clock in the camera so I relied on Photoshop to help with the creative piece.

My first idea was to liquefy it. Salvador Dali, the famous Spanish artist had done that so I used Photoshop’s “puppet warp” tool to squash it up a bit. That seemed like a good start but I needed to do more than that. Then I came up with the theme of “killing time” so I decided to create a clock image with that title, complete with bullet holes and blood drippings. This is the final image.