David Blackwell.'s photostream  

Challenged by blackpoolstudio on deviantart to create something with a portrait they provided as stock on deviantart.

"Blindman Shooting" (500px.com/blindmanshooting) - a photographer living in NY these days challenged me to come up with my interpretation of his video clip "Amboy". The video features Blndman's photos from 1980, when on a trip along Highway 66 in California, he got stuck in a traffic jam and had to turn of the road in search of petrol. The nearest place was Amboy. What he found there he documented in wonderful b&w photos. These he collected into a slideshow and added music by Willie Nelson. The song is "Funny how time slips away".

blindman asked me to watch the video and create an "answer" the David-way based on my feelings while watching the pictures.

If you want to spend 5 minutes in awe of an award-winning photographer and his art, I can only recommend you go and watch his video Amboy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0D9PUoAraY

You see, I always wondered about that. Then I found out it's chocolate ice cream that makes them forget everything. It all makes sense, you see.

The lesson in this for all aspiring volunteers for portrait work with me is: never give me permission to keep the outtakes from your shoots for use later. :-)

Thanks to Olga for being such a great sport! This sentence is purely preemptive. She hasn't seen me create this yet, and she hasn't seen it posted all over the internet yet either.

Update: She has seen the picture and I am still alive and well. :-)

Hm, where do I start with this story? One of my neighbors is a professional photographer, earning her money with portraits, architecture, wedding and generally any other type of photography she can get commissions. This is not a very easy and reliable way to make money, I can tell you.

So we get talking and I ask her whether she had ever considered stock photography for the times when business was not brisk. Turns out she had not really. So she promised to look into it and ask my help with "that internet thing", i.e. the commercial side of stock photography.

Then we talked about retouching portraits in photoshop. She nearly never retouches her work because clients don't generally pay for the time and don't always appreciate the results. She asked me to share some quick and easy portrait retouching techniques that she could apply so that she could offer clients an additional "beauty" pic as an add-on service.

This is how I started to think about the quickest and most effective portrait retouching techniques. Yesterday we sat together in the afternoon and practiced the few steps I had come up with. She was amazed what could be done with very little effort and time, provided you knew how to use photoshop effectively. My technique for retouching has few steps, but requires advanced PS know-how as I use filters and methods not usually used, in this case the "Apply image" method.

She promised to practice and I promised to check up on her learning.

Back home I used a stock picture to create this piece just to wind down from an intensive teaching session. I am really into the old masters' style as you can tell. :-)

Thanks to Jolindar on deviantart for the girl stock.

Big Game Hunting is not a game.

Perhaps you remember the series of animal portraits I posted some time back, with the polar bears, penguins, etc. I created the rhino picture at that same time but never posted it. Until today that is.