Monday 15 October 2007

Digital Photo Exercise

cube-autumn

I just fancied trying one of the exercises from Digital Photo magazine to make something Autumnal. With the shops selling Christmas stuff under "seasonal", I need some on-screen reminder that the season is still Autumn, and not Winter.

Unless you are south of the Equator, in South Africa, for example. With the addition of a reader from there, that means this blog has picked up at least one reader from each of the non-ice-covered continents. ClustrMap

4 comments:

Michael914 said...

Like the Image you have here, like the look of the shape, and how It Illustrates autumn with the leaves on the trees and on the ground.

Duncan said...

Thanks, Michael. It is a bit basic, as it just uses some of the shots from Westburn Park on Saturday. I liked the idea of cubes of leaves tumbling to the ground, dice-like. But I didn't have enough single-leaves.

The magazine has a cube template, but I suppose the 3d shapes in MS Office could be used instead and imported into Photoshop. Then copy-paste normal squares of the images to add, and use the Transformation - Distort to manipulate the graphic on to the cube, dragging each corner to match a corner of the face.

I added a 10-pixel 'stroke' effect - no idea why it isn't called a border, but hey ho. That gave the outline of the cube's faces.

The background was dropped in, given a satin effect finish, dropping the opacity to slight fade it down, drawing the viewer's attention to the cube. Hopefully.

The toughest part was maintaining the cube shape when making sure the layers met in the corners.

I need to do more of these exercises, as they'll improve my skills and are quite fun too.

Alex Griffiths said...

That looks pretty suave, i like it. Adding a little geometry to a chaotic world and all that.

While winter is by far my favorite season for artistic inspiration; the colours in autumn are simply amazing.

Duncan said...

High praise indeed, Alex. thank you.

Billy Connolly said once, "There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing" - I'd add to that something about being in the right frame of mind.

Getting back into the outdoors had helped me see the 'big picture', eg this, but now I've been watching the effect of water on stones, the 'small picture', eg this. It is all great, and helps me appreciate life a bit more.