Apr 7, 2008 | Mary Ann Bridge
This is a unique photograph. I wish you had given more detail in the caption. I've never seen a cemetery that looked like this, but from the word "Missing" I'm assuming that is what this is. The inset of the smaller piece? Was this a message? I guess I'm just guessing with this; maybe it has nothing to do with cemeteries.
Apr 8, 2008 | James Kiefer
Mary Ann, Thanks for looking and commenting. This is part of the memorial at the site of the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing. Each victim has a copper accented chair. The smaller ones are for children lost in the blast (there was an on-site day care). It is an impressive museum and monument both in impact as well as artistic design.
In the original image, all of the chairs were the same color, and the grass was a pre-Spring dull yellow color. To draw more attention to the child's seat...the most moving part of the museum and display to me...I did a pseudo IR conversion to monochrome for the rest of the scene. I am not generally a selective color person, but here it felt right to me. Thanks again. Jim
Apr 9, 2008 | Mary Ann Bridge
Wow - now I understand. Your workmanship on this photo is as impressive as the memorial site must be. I don't think many people have seen this, otherwise it would have been posted to the web at some time. Maybe it's your photo that is unique to this message. I don't know what you do with your photos, but I think this is one that would be printed in a lot of magazines if it were made available.
Apr 9, 2008 | James Kiefer
Mary Ann, now you have made my head so large it will not fit through doorways. Thank you for your kind words. The edit on this image was not very complicated. I used two channel mixer layers. One pushed the greens to intensity them. The other did the BW conversion. I set the BW one to less than 100% opacity to let some of the color of the other chairs pass through but masked the central chair completely. The blurring was partly the aperture in the shot and partly through a High Pass softening layer ("stamp visible" to make a merged copy of layer stack->invert that layer via Image-Adjust-Invert; then set mode to Overlay and run Filter-Other-High Pass...radius was ~5 pixels). I masked the chair again to keep it sharp. Sharpening on this image was done with High Pass as well (same procedure as described...just don't do the invert step).
I try to do as much in camera as possible, and when I edit in PS, I try to make it look as natural and unedited as possible. PS is great, because it can be used to make large changes (e.g. the colors in the IR photos) but do it with a velvet touch.
Thanks again, Jim
Comments
Apr 7, 2008 | Mary Ann Bridge
This is a unique photograph. I wish you had given more detail in the caption. I've never seen a cemetery that looked like this, but from the word "Missing" I'm assuming that is what this is. The inset of the smaller piece? Was this a message? I guess I'm just guessing with this; maybe it has nothing to do with cemeteries.
Apr 8, 2008 | James Kiefer
Mary Ann, Thanks for looking and commenting. This is part of the memorial at the site of the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing. Each victim has a copper accented chair. The smaller ones are for children lost in the blast (there was an on-site day care). It is an impressive museum and monument both in impact as well as artistic design. In the original image, all of the chairs were the same color, and the grass was a pre-Spring dull yellow color. To draw more attention to the child's seat...the most moving part of the museum and display to me...I did a pseudo IR conversion to monochrome for the rest of the scene. I am not generally a selective color person, but here it felt right to me. Thanks again. Jim
Apr 9, 2008 | Mary Ann Bridge
Wow - now I understand. Your workmanship on this photo is as impressive as the memorial site must be. I don't think many people have seen this, otherwise it would have been posted to the web at some time. Maybe it's your photo that is unique to this message. I don't know what you do with your photos, but I think this is one that would be printed in a lot of magazines if it were made available.
Apr 9, 2008 | James Kiefer
Mary Ann, now you have made my head so large it will not fit through doorways. Thank you for your kind words. The edit on this image was not very complicated. I used two channel mixer layers. One pushed the greens to intensity them. The other did the BW conversion. I set the BW one to less than 100% opacity to let some of the color of the other chairs pass through but masked the central chair completely. The blurring was partly the aperture in the shot and partly through a High Pass softening layer ("stamp visible" to make a merged copy of layer stack->invert that layer via Image-Adjust-Invert; then set mode to Overlay and run Filter-Other-High Pass...radius was ~5 pixels). I masked the chair again to keep it sharp. Sharpening on this image was done with High Pass as well (same procedure as described...just don't do the invert step). I try to do as much in camera as possible, and when I edit in PS, I try to make it look as natural and unedited as possible. PS is great, because it can be used to make large changes (e.g. the colors in the IR photos) but do it with a velvet touch. Thanks again, Jim
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