Handcoloring, again...

Several years ago, i did a post about hand-coloring B&W prints:
http://californiasilverwizard.blogspot.com/2009/06/hand-coloring-b-photo-prints-dying-art.html
and a follow-up page on my site:
http://www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2009/Handcolor/index.html
There's loads of info on these pages about basic techniques & materials, I don't need to repeat them here/again.

But first, the 'whatever catches my eye' file:

Bottle Tree Ranch is a folk art 'forest' in the Mojave Desert
Elmer Long's two-plus acres are crowded with hundreds of metal sculptures adorned with colored bottles and just about anything else one could imagine.
By Mike Anton, Los Angeles Times
December 4, 2011
(Photo: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times )

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-me-bottle-farm-20111204,0,4510530.story
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Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers
Published: December 3, 2011
By Julie Bosman
"...If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading...."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/books/publishers-gild-books-with-special-effects-to-compete-with-e-books.html?_r=1&hp
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Snipping the bud: Prep work is a payday in the marijuana business
An international, countercultural labor force prepares pot on its path to market. Trimmers can make $200 a day plus lodging, sometimes 'with a crazy guy in the middle of the woods with an AK-47.'
By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times
December 2, 2011

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1202-marijuana-trim-20111202,0,2941044.story?page=1&track=rss
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The Pot Republic - Frontline/ PBS
http://video.pbs.org/video/2070629540
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Shoot Stunning Night Photos Like a Pro
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/shoot-stunning-night-photos-like-a-pro/

by Jakob Shiller - for 'Wired' mag., 11/30/2011

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Sand has superhero qualities, as far as geological deposits go. Behaving at times like a solid, at times a liquid and at times a gas, it is a master shape-shifter. Formed by wind and water, sand allows large-scale geography to play out in miniature: settling into ripples, channels, canyons, valleys and deltas.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/sand-patterns-gallery/
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Learning To Spot the Photoshop
By KJ Antonia | Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011, at 10:30 AM ET at Slate.com

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/11/30/a_tool_to_spot_photoshopping_that_won_t_work_unless_advertisers_agree_to_use_it_.html
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Field Notes - Making Sure No Guest Is Forgotten
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
Published: October 21, 2011
After five hours of preparation, Terry Gruber was putting the finishing touches on the creation of a single, 12-by-20-inch black-and-white group portrait known in its heyday as a banquet photo. Most popular in the late 1880s, when Mr. Gruber’s banquet camera was made, until the late 1960s when it began fading from vogue, the large group photo all but vanished in a Nikon nanosecond.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/fashion/weddings/banquet-photos-put-everyone-in-the-picture-field-notes.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=field%20notes%20making%20sure%20no%20guest%20is%20forgotten&st=cse

Photo - Earl Wilson/NYTimes

http://gruberphotographers.com/Banquet%20Group
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James Durston: Photography has ruined travel
Next time you pack for your vacation, leave the technology behind
15 November, 2011

"......So here’s a challenge: get lost. Seriously. Next time you’re in a new town, ditch the phone. Disable your GPS. Close your eyes, point, then open them and walk. If you need to find somewhere, ask someone."
http://www.cnngo.com/explorations/life/tell-me-about-it/james-durston-photography-has-ruined-travel-361992?hpt=hp_bn13

One of the best rolls I ever shot was made when taking this advice. I woke up in some small town in SE Arizona, and did my usual road trip routine - 'wake, bake, coffee, and hit the road'!
I was heading for Chiricahua, it was a off the beaten track backroads route... and I drove thru this town that looked like it was a-dying on the vine, so to speak. Here's what I shot, I got a number of montage images out of this simple row of vacant storefronts, all perfectly lit by morning sun.

Being at the right place, at the right time?.... that's magical.
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It Started Digital Wheels Turning
Punch cards for the never-completed Babbage Analytical Engine, and Charles Babbage, the "father of computing," who kept refining his design.
Published: November 7, 2011 - NY Times
By John Markoff
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/computer-experts-building-1830s-babbage-analytical-engine.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=First%20Computer&st=cse

Someone who took it to the next level: Alan Turing, during WW2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Turing.html

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Camera Lost at Sea Returned with the Help of Social Networking
http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/camera-lost-sea-returned-help-social-networking-215800650.html
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Now, on to some photography, and the hand-coloring thing!

I recently traded a few emails w/ an old photographer friend, from back east, where i used to live in a previous incarnation, until 20 years ago.
One of his questions to me was 'how are you integrating digital into your work flow (=montage work)?' - Good question.
Up until recently, the answer would have been 'not at all'.
On the splash page of my website, i say:
"FYI/FWIW - A majority of the images on this site are made in a traditional / chemical B&W darkroom.
That includes everything in the 'Coast & Desert' Portfolios, & 'Assignments' above.. and obviously all the 'Darkroom 2001....2010' pages below.
And I'll continue to do so...until there just isn't anything traditional to work with."

Whereas that is still true, i have started to take darkroom prints into digital, and 'put some icing on the cake' so to speak. I'm sure I'm not alone in doing this, i know of a few people who do things similarly, and that's just the few people I know.
Soooo...here's two images that had darkroom origins, had really good hand-coloring possibilities, and were dragged into P'shop... and what happened then - "Coffee Shop" and "Ottta Gas".
I also did traditional hand-coloring on both, let's take a look at how it all worked out.


"Coffee shop" was inspired by a neg I took in Blythe CA., not too far from Joshua Tree. It's one of those desert towns that seems to close down at sunset. The coffee shop sign was still brightly lit at 7 PM... I took a few frames, moved on... had some dinner.
The table w/ coffee cups was taken in Marin Headlands, many years ago, as a display of US military stuff. I did this one in the darkroom, and knew that it was a candidate for hand-coloring. I decided to try the 'hand' coloring digitally (with the hand being on a mouse).
I can do some things w/ this, digitally, that i can't do in traditional/chemical darkroom - i can fix the bottom of the 'c' in coffee shop, for one. And once you get into fiddling w/ an image in P'shop... well, I've heard many photogs say, in so many words, the same thing: 'the best thing about P'shop is that you can do anything; and the worst thing about it is?..you can do anything (and get lost in the possibilities!)'.

I think being focused in advance on what you want to accomplish is very important, and I had a good idea of what i wanted to do w/ this one: the glow of the coffee shop signs needed to be reflected by everything on the table, lots of yellow/orange colors.
So here's a look at the digitally colored:


..and the handcolored.


Yes, there's a link at the end of the post to a page on my site w/ larger images, and a small P'shop file so you can see how it was done.
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"Outta Gas"
Not sure where i took the photo of the defunct gas station, it was that kinda road trip... i know the sky/horizon was taken in AZ. Here's the darkroom print:


I didn't do a digital hand-color on this one, but i did scan the traditionally hand-colored, and worked on that in Photoshop.
(The photoshop tweaks are too subtle for the image size here - click the link below to see larger images)
Suffice it to say that none of the photoshop tweaks are sea changes - they are really 'tweaks'....


As usual, larger images, a few more comments, on a page at my site:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/Handcolor2/index.html


Oh, BTW...have yourself a merry 'christ-moose'!!

Darkroom - 'Transformation Tree'

Here's the photoshop sketch of the darkroom print for this post:


But first, as always, the 'whatever catches my eye' file...

Short video, HUGE wave!!!!
http://www.grindtv.com/surf/blog/30981/is+this+the+largest+wave+ever+ridden/
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A Store of Images, From a Time When ‘Cut and Paste’ Meant Just That.
(London Bookstore sells clip art in an online world)
By Noam Cohen - Published: October 30, 2011, NY Times.
"... The books that dominate the shelves — large paperbacks with prosaic titles like “Animals” or “Plants” or “Hands” — are more like catalogs of random images that have one thing in common: their age.
Dating largely from the 19th century and culled from old magazines, advertisements and books, these pictures are not covered by copyright laws. Artists around the world can use the images any way they want — cut and copied, altered or combined. No one “owns” them anymore.
Artists describe these books of “clip art” as a spur to creativity — a way to conjure up the curved outline of a lion or the way a hand grasps a hammer. But they are also ready-made images, often of high quality, that can be easily reused or repurposed.......
These clip art books, with dozens of examples of plants, pipes or old-fashioned mustaches, show that people were happily doing image searches long before they had the benefit of a search engine. And people were manipulating those images long before they could click and drag them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/business/media/a-london-bookstore-sells-clip-art-in-an-online-world.html?_r=1&hpw


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Friday, November 4, 2011 9:10am PDT
Flock of Starlings aerial ballet
By: Pete Thomas - GrindTV.com
Do you know what a 'murmuration' is, and have you ever witnessed such a dazzling display of avian behavior? The accompanying video shows an enormous flock of starlings - a murmuration - swirling through the sky in a magnificent ballet that almost seems choreographed.

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/blog/30930/flock+of+starlings+dazzling+aerial+ballet+captured+on+video/

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Menacing storm clouds
Photographs of dark thunderstorm clouds from around the world.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/menacing-storm-clouds-1319573041-slideshow/
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Loving the Chambered Nautilus to Death
Published: October 24, 2011 - New York Times - By William Broad
It is a living fossil whose ancestors go back a half billion years — to the early days of complex life on the planet, when the land was barren and the seas were warm.Naturalists have long marveled at its shell. The logarithmic spiral echoes the curved arms of hurricanes and distant galaxies......

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25nautilus.html?_r=1&hpw

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Giant amoebas discovered 6 miles deep
October 24, 2011 3:00 PM

"The identification of these gigantic cells in one of the deepest marine environments on the planet opens up a whole new habitat for further study of biodiversity, biotechnological potential and extreme environment adaptation," said Doug Bartlett, the Scripps marine microbiologist who organized the expedition."

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-20124830/giant-amoebas-discovered-6-miles-deep/?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.10

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Op-Ed Contributor Running Out of Bandwidth
By LOWELL C. McADAM
Published: October 21, 2011
Demand for faster speeds and more applications is growing at a tremendous rate. But without prompt government action, the lifeblood of this innovative sector of the economy is at risk of being choked off.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/opinion/wireless-spectrum-should-be-reallocated.html?_r=1
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Close encounters in the Galapagos
By A. Pawlowski, CNN
updated 6:17 PM EST, Fri October 21, 2011


http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/18/travel/galapagos-tips-destination-adventure/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
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Big-Game Hunt Adds to Evidence of Early North American Settlement
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
Published: October 20, 2011
For many years, it was thought that the Clovis people were the first humans to populate North America, about 13,000 years ago.
But recently, evidence has suggested that other settlers arrived earlier, and a new study lends support to that hypothesis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25mastodon.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&hpw=&adxnnlx=1319241721-NGnEqRRWoAruTZvxHXpHew

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Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

Jonas Pfeil, a student at the Technical University of Berlin, noticed that there was no easy way to take a complete spherical, panoramic photograph. Even if you had enough cameras and the right software, you would still have the problem of a tripod or camera mount blocking one angle. The solution? A rubber ball camera -- just toss it in the air.


http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera

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Lytro ready to release 1st light-field camera
Unlike existing cameras, the Lytro captures all the rays of light in a given scene, as opposed to flat images, creating a range of new possibilities. Photographers can change the focus of an image as often as they like, for example, and by next year they will be able to present their images in three dimensions.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/the-revolution-in-photography/8733/
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/21/BU6S1LJOO3.DTL

One sentence in this article really caught my eye:

"Regular cameras are too hard to use," Ng said. "They had all these modes and buttons and settings. We stripped that all away."

Yeah, i 'second that emotion', but i don't think the Lytro is the answer, at least, not for me - how 'bout a digital camera without all the bells and whistles, just controls like traditional cameras ( shutter speed, depth of field/aperture ) and.... a lense that is SHARP! And, yes, at a decent consumer level price!

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Fear and Loathing.... at Rolling Stone
Excerpts from the essential writings of Hunter S. Thompson:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/fear-and-loathing-at-rolling-stone-20111021

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‘Cassette tape’ kicked out of ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ edition
http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2011/10/17/cassette-tape-kicked-out-of-oxford-english-dictionary/

Playtime is over for cassette tapes.
Wordsmiths over at the Oxford English Dictionary say “cassette tape” has been removed from the pages of its Concise edition to make room for words such as retweet and cyberbullying, USA Today reported earlier this month. (Note: The word will remain in the unabridged version.)
Yes, it’s a sad time for cassette tape enthusiasts and those of us who still have a dusty shoe box filled with mix tapes, their labels decorated with colorful doodles and lame titles such as “Amy’s RAGE tape” and “Madonna Madness.”
But while it might be depressing to think tapes are so passé that they can’t even make it into the dictionary, Oxford’s decision makes sense. Auto makers recently stopped equipping their cars with cassette decks. And who has a working cassette player in their home anymore? My Sony boom box died years ago.

--------- oh please!!! As soon as you hear anything is 'over the hill'? it will have a resurgence, bet on it. I have one (cassette) that smokes just about anything: 'South-side Johnny and the Asbury Jukes' - "Love is a sacrifice". I bought it at a 'roadside shack' in 'not-so-surburban Va.' in... uh... 1982?? or 1983??It stands the test of time - just as awesome now, as it was then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7NCz9lP11I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJLo5EkU7Lo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VSf90_uPYc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI_LjHiYTgg&feature=related
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Album Connoisseurs Eschew the Shuffle, Embrace Flaws; That 'Sweet Plasticy Smell'.
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/113689/cassette-tapes-connoisseurs-wsj
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Chevrolet Turns 100

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/10/21/automobiles/collectibles/100000001128225/chevrolet-turns-100.html
A Century of Chevy, From Cheap Date to America’s Sweetheart
By JERRY GARRETT, JAMES G. COBB, PHIL PATTON, STUART ELLIOTT, JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN and NORMAN MAYERSOHN
Published: October 21, 2011
"Its Impalas dropped us off at school. Its pickup trucks hauled our produce on the farm. Its Corvette sustained our sports car fantasies through the boredom of high school algebra class. Earlier than almost any other automotive brand, Chevy created a palette of vehicles that ranged from the small and thrifty to the sleek and sporty to the large and smartly trimmed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/automobiles/chevrolet-unlikely-cornerstone-for-gm.html?hp
("Full disclosure" here??....Yep!, my dad owned and ran a Chevy dealership in a small town in Maine, '55 - '78.)
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Onward, to some photomontage!

Transformation Tree

This image is ridiculously simple - a gnarly and warped tree trunk, in Chiracahua (Arizona),
which waited for many years for an answer, for a complimenting sky, equally spinning and swirling.
Is 'mother earth' breathing?... exhaling?.... I dunno. What do you think? I have called it 'transformation tree', which works, for the time being.
The print is very simple dodging/blend - sky dodged out to zero by about the middle, tree dodged similarly, but from the bottom up.
Once again, it's about having the right negatives, and taking the time to figure out which ones work together, to come up with a '1+1=3' kinda thing.
This one is a good lead-in to some discussion about hand-coloring. Some of my prints scream 'color me!'... some don't, but I color them anyway.
This is one image that does not benefit from handcoloring, at all. It works because the texture in the tree bark and in the clouds is so similar. It works well as simple B&W... if i add color?

No way, this works against what is going on, it splits the image into 2 sections, brown tree bark, blue sky. You've heard the old saying "less is more"?.... yep, that's the ticket, here. You might think that this rather similar image, "Driftwood face", would strike me the same way.

It didn't - my idea? - that some color in those eyes ( what a penetrating stare, hunh?) could 'bleed' into the sky. I did a photoshop sketch, and this one has possibilities:
There is one challenging/difficult thing about that idea - the eyes are pretty much dead black - can I inject enough color into them, to make this idea work? It's easier to do digitally than by hand/on the print... I'm gonna give a throw anyway. For larger views of some the images above, a page on my site:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/TransformationTree/index.html