My GPS Camera Phone

Moving on from Grayscale Week, I now present to you the first entry of Sepia Week! Given the nature of the on-board camera effect, I will not be doing anything with this week’s photos except for some cropping and resizing. Working with the sepia tones in Photoshop would render the concept of the theme week invalid, so the sepia tones you’re seeing are camera-generated.

This here photo is of an old church building across from Roper Park, site of the W. Haisley Lynch memorial I previously blogged about. The sun was setting behind the building, so I had to adjust the exposure to darken it, but apparently it wasn’t enough. Still, I like the shot. Notice the little bird up there on the top wire.

Jeez, I get 60 RSS subscribers and it goes to my head. No posts in a week! Well, I can assure you that I’ve left Cloud 9 and have resumed the life of the mundane, as portrayed in this most plain shot of a sunset viewed from a strip mall parking lot.

Of course, I had to do something to liven it up. I mean, it’s a strip mall parking lot, come on. For now, I’ll give you the basics and then maybe make it a tutorial. Here goes:

Open Photoshop CS2. First, I did the basic level adjustments and cropping, along with an auto color adjustment. Then, I killed some of the ugliness by using a radial blur set to zoom, focusing on the sunset. Finally, I decided to add a lens flare, even though it’s a filter that’s way overused. In this case, I think it’s excusable.

I hope you enjoy. I’ll be posting more, promise. Thanks for sticking with me.

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This was a fun exercise in Photoshop filter application. Many times, filters are overdone and abused, causing the image to look worse than it did originally. However, when applied in moderation, they can produce interesting results.

The image here was shot with my camera phone, as usual, and then edited in Photoshop CS. After a bit of cropping, I added a level adjustment layer to even out the colors. Then a single, overhead light was rendered to brighten up the center and darken the edges, adding a little more depth and drama. After that, I added a 40% pinch distortion, followed by a gentle ocean ripple. All of this was then covered up with a layer of clouds set to 15% opacity.

The image itself was a snapshot of the setting sun’s rays between the clouds as seen from my office window. (I get some great sunsets.) While the original shot was nice, I didn’t want to post another sunset photo. So I inverted it and applied the steps above, producing something that looks more like water than air.

With that said, I task you to start thinking of strange and unorthodox ways to capture photos with your camera phone. After that, try something even stranger in your favorite photo editing software. With a little imagination (and sometimes a lot of moderation!), you can produce something far beyond the ordinary.

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Here’s the finished product from yesterday’s Photoshop tutorial, How-to Prepare a Photo for the Web.

Thanks for all of your comments on the tutorial. The next one will probably be working in Google’s free photo editing software, Picasa2, so don’t feel left out if you aren’t a Photoshop user. You can get it by downloading and installing Google Pack by using the link below. Stay tuned!