Mr. Me

Peeking at a Pine Tree

Pin Holed

This is how I achieved this pin-hole effect.

Light bulb Trails

Colored light shoots out of a light bulb

So one day I read that the shape of your aperture determines the shape of your bokeh, so I set out to explore this further. I cut out a bunch of cardboard circles, cut different shapes into these circles, and stuck these circles in my lens. Sure enough, the bokeh matched the shape of the hole, however, what I found to be interesting was to play around with a pin-hole cut into the cardboard, mimicking the effect of a pin-hole camera. It must also be noted that because I’m not the best at cutting out circles there was some light leaking in from the edges of the cardboard. This is one of the pictures I took with this “pin-hole” camera.

GIMP 2.8 Released

If you don’t already know, a new version of GIMP has been released. This new version has a bunch of all around improvements to the engine, the tools, the UI, and everything. Big changes in GIMP 2.8 are: A single window mode Tabbing. I love tabs! Layer groups Less annoying dialogs when you save improved brush tool […]

Splitting an Image

Warning: If you’ll want to follow along with the examples you’ll need GIMP. Photoshop users will still be able to learn about the theory behind spatial frequencies. Intro It’s possible to extract different components from a picture, like the color or the details (so we can sharpen the picture). To extract this information we first […]

Looking Out

As I often do, I messed with the foreground-background relationship. I applied a focus blur to the background, and brightened it up. I would like to talk about the way this picture was sharpened. It’s quite interesting. When blurring the image, instead of obtaining the high frequencies by applying a gaussian blur, I used a bilateral filter.

Looking Up

final version

The colors in this picture distracts the viewer from the main subject, and doesn’t add any value to the picture so I converted it to black and white. Notice how you can see the eyes of the person in the bottom left. A great way to make a person fade into the background is to remove their eyes, either by cropping them out or by placing an object in front of them. Here I wanted to crop in a bit more than that to remove the people in the top left and focus on the subject, and the people surrounding him. I used RawTherapee’s HSV tool to modify the brightness of different colors to try to make the background people’s shirts uniform with the background. The most important part of this image has to be the childish feeling it portrays by putting everyone else aside and focusing on one child.

Energetic

A little boy excited to be at disneyland

I used rawtherapee to process this picture.

Screaming it out

screaming it out

Don’t you love it when you catch someone with an unexpected expression on their face.

Delicate Stream

little stream flowing through rock canyon

This picture was taken early in the morning as soon as night started lifting and the sky brightened a bit. There was still over an hour or so until the sun would come up, and it would be what photographers like to call the golden hour. I sort of like taking pictures at this time of day better than the golden hour, but I think that might just be because I like the feeling of being up and taking pictures in the mountains early in the morning. The only source of light in this picture was the moon.