The Hybrid Artist
Chris Meyer of Crish Design has been involved in both the music industry as a musician, sound designer, recording engineer, and designer of electronic instruments and recording devices; as well as the motion graphics industry where he and his wife Trish create animations for broadcast, film, special venues, trade shows, and web sites. However, before both, he had an interest in photography - an interest he continues to nurture today through the use of photographs as the starting point in mixed media art, often employing experimental printing te...
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Tools can't help you if you don't use them...
By Chris Meyer | February 22, 2011
Literally the evening after I posted my Digital Printing 101 article, my sister came over to print out some mandala/spirograph-like iStock images to decorate her office with. I opened the images, loaded the correct printer/paper profile (HP Z3100 onto Breathing Color Vibrance Luster photo paper, with gloss enhancer enabled - helps prevent "bronzing" when there's a lot of black in the print), and printed, feeling quite full of myself.
The first one came out great. However, the second one didn't match what we saw on screen. Obviously, I had a bit of egg on my face, after just proclaiming to the world I had the answer for reliable, correct digital printing. However, a bit of sleuthing revealed:
It wasn't my fault - but...
I could have fixed it before wasting paper and ink - and losing face.
{C}
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The basic steps to getting what you see on paper match what you saw on your screen.
By Chris Meyer | February 18, 2011
Q: Which one of these test swatches is correct? A: None of them.
An example of life before we learned how to follow a color managed workflow while printing.
One old theory of knowledge was that we were born knowing everything (having gained that knowledge in a previous life), and it was just a matter of "remembering" that which was obvious once explained. Well, with all due respect to the ancient Greeks, color managed print workflow - the best way to ensure what you print is as close as possible to the original image - is not obvious, and being a relatively recent development in the world of photography, we don't have knowledge from a prior life to draw on.
That said, neither is it unknowable - and you don't have to reinvent the wheel to learn it yourself. After watching fellow artists beat their heads against the wall or print endless tests hoping to land upon the magic combination that works for them (and having done that very thing myself several years ago), I thought it would be worth outlining the basic workflow to create repeatable, as-accurate-as-circumstances-will-allow printing. Yes, there will always be devilish details and inevitable exceptions, but this will give you a solid foundation to build on.
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Taking advantage of Camera Raw to recover detail in a blown-out scene.
By Chris Meyer | February 14, 2011
Default JPEG image on the left; processed Camera Raw image on the right.
A few years ago, I made a decision: I was going to save every image I shot using the Camera Raw file format. This decision is as automatic as waking up for professional photographers, but may bring apprehension for many amateur and semi-pro shooters. Indeed, I dare say more are creating multi-image HDR files (thanks to the profusion of tools available today - even for cell phone cameras!) than using Camera Raw. Therefore, I'd like to walk through how Camera Raw saved what would have been an otherwise unusable shot in hopes that it helps convert a few more into taking advantage of this format.{C}
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A lovely piece - with some interesting aesthetic decisions.
By Chris Meyer | February 04, 2011
More people are experimenting with combining timelapse photography and motion control to create wonderful "videos" using still image cameras. One particularly lovely one is The Chapel by Patryk Kizny of LookyCreative. In addition to some of the nicest motion control timelapse moves I've seen (way beyond your typical horizontal slider bar movement) and a stunning setting (an abandoned, derelict Protestant temple in Zeliszów, Poland built at the end of the 18th century), Patryk also employed HDR (High Dynamic Range) capture and processing to pull details out of the interior of a building illuminated only by windowlight.{C}
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Luminous Landscape puts the Leaf Aptus II-12 and Phase One IQ180 through their paces.
By Chris Meyer | February 03, 2011
I really appreciated the move up from our old 6 MP (megapixel) Canon 10D to a 21 MP Canon 5D mkII: Not only could I print larger images with respectable resolution, I could also pull finer detail out of an image, or zoom in on and crop down to a relatively small portion of the frame. But of course, this is tiddlywinks compared to really high-end digital camera backs, where 80 MP is defining the new high end. The well-respected Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape notes "if you step up from a 24MP or smaller DSLR you'll be stepping into the bizzaro universe, where resolving tiny flecks of mascara on a model's eyelashes from 20 feet away becomes commonplace, and being able to clearly see telephone wires at a distance of 2 miles always amazes."
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Who needs the sun, when you can just keep the shutter open longer?
By Chris Meyer | February 01, 2011
photo by K.C. Alfred from Gizmodo's "Photos of Day Taken at Night"
As some of you no doubt know (but which I just discovered today), Gizmodo regularly has a set of shooting challenges. The most recently posted results concern shooting a night, but an exposure long enough that the result is bright enough to be mistaken at first glance as daylight. The result tends toward pastel colors and dreamy motion blur of objects like the sea and clouds. I've been having a lot of fun taking advantage of the Camera Raw dialog to tease more out of photos shot with my 5D (which seems to have a couple of stops of latitude - a lovely sensor resides inside that body), but this opens a whole new area to explore.
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Couldn't resist running out and getting this shot.
By Chris Meyer | January 31, 2011
Here in the East Mountains of New Mexico, a pair of winter storms are rolling in. Fitful flurries were followed by miniature styrofoam pellets were followed by real snow, which is now accumulating on any horizontal perch in the perfect still. As dusk was falling, I noticed one of our new seedlings in the courtyard was accumulating snow on its thin branches, so I ran outside quickly with the 5D and snapped some pictures. This was the best (before I started getting too wet); I took several shots until I was happy with the framing of the foreground versus the background. When shooting in show, it's hard to find contrast; I kept moving around until I was happy with what the dark rock was doing as a backdrop, and made sure the aspen on the left and red rock on the right framed rather than distracted from the foreground.{C}
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A journey from a landscaping rock to an abstract collage.
By Chris Meyer | January 29, 2011
The primary reason I agreed to write this Hybrid Artist blog was to share information about using photographs as the basis for creating collages as well as other forms of abstracted art. In that vein, here is a quick blow-by-blow for the latest piece I finished: Avian Aspirations.
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Missteps and musings on the path to a lighter camera support.
By Chris Meyer | January 29, 2011
I take most of my photos while hiking. My most common subjects are either close-ups of rocks and plants, which requires razor-sharp focus, or long and wide shots of landscapes with a preference for a very deep focal plane. Both of these benefit from being as stable as possible while shooting - and unfortunately, I'm not a very good statue.
Although virtually all of my lenses have image stabilization built in, I've been looking for a lightweight, highly functional monopod/tripod and head combination that's easier to take with me than our studio sticks (Manfrotto 3221WN tripod with 490RC4 ball head, weighing in at 8.5 pounds). This article is a loose wrap-up of my first halting steps in that direction, in hopes that my missteps may help you avoid similar pitfalls.
{C}
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Don't forget to look down and around when photographing a famous site.
By Chris Meyer | January 11, 2011
We spent the holidays traveling around Arizona and New Mexico, fitting in a few hikes and sightseeing excursions as we went. One hike was Red Rock Crossing - Crescent Moon in Sedona, which ends in a view of the west face of Cathedral Rock. As Laurent Martr©s notes in his very useful Photographing the Southwest books, "this classic photograph has become just as clich© as, say, Delicate Arch". Adding to the feeling of "what can I do here that hasn't already been done?", trip timing required that we visit in the morning, rather than the preferred late afternoon.
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Artists make the most of a crumbling world.
By Chris Meyer | January 09, 2011
In a post-industrial world, scenes of urban and industrial decay is the new wabi sabi: "nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect" (Richard Powell). And perhaps nowhere in the US is decay more evident than areas of Detroit. As a result, Detroit has become a rich source of inspiration for photojournalists.
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Combining dolly moves with timelapse photography to show off my favorite region of the country.
By Chris Meyer | November 21, 2009
Having made the move recently from California to New Mexico, loving to shoot both states (and points in between), and having recently bought a Canon 5D Mark II, I was happy to have recently encountered Timescapes.org, who is currently working on a film about the area - Southwest Light - which is being shot timelapse with DSLRs such as the 5D. What makes some of these scenes particularly interesting is the motion control dolly they are using: A stepper motor is incrementing the camera's position between shots along a slide rail, combining the sensation of panning (a "dolly shot") with timelapse - nice work.
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Distressing a photo to accidentally create a prize-winning collage.
By Chris Meyer | November 01, 2009
The journey from a clean photo of a modern building to a distressed, impressionistic print.
Although I have spent a fair amount of money to buy camera equipment and digital printers which can produce a more-perfect image, the truth is that my personal aesthetic is more along the lines of wabi-sabi: an appreciation for the aged, weathered, and decayed. So what happens when I take a clean photo of the San Diego Museum of Modern History, a fine modern architectural example of a glass, metal, and stone? I have to distress it. The irony is, the result won a prize - and few realized it was a digital print of a photograph. Here's one photograph's journey into the realm of accelerated aging:
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Eye candy: A quick shot at photographing falling snow.
By Chris Meyer | October 29, 2009
We had our first good snow in the mountains today. At one point when the flakes got particularly large, my wife Trish asked if I could get a photo that showed off the individual flakes, as her PowerShot SD870 IS was insisting on too long of a shutter time. So I picked up the Canon 5D mkII, slapped on its stock 24-105mm L IS lens, opened it up all the way to f=4.0 with a 1/2000 shutter speed at ISO 500, and fired a few pics through the office window (I know - a real man would have went outside).
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A balloon story that isn't a hoax.
By Chris Meyer | October 18, 2009
For those who have made the move to digital cameras, an inevitable consequence of the relentless march of technology is that we end up with cameras that are "obsolete" (because the new model has more pixels, less compression, video capabilities, etc.).
So what do we do with those old cameras? How about using them to get a shot we otherwise wouldn't consider going for, because we might lose the camera in the process?{C}
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HAL displays mad Photoshop skills. Should he collect the royalties?
By Chris Meyer | October 08, 2009
A very interesting system was recently demonstrated at SIGGRAPH Asia that allows a user to make a rough sketch of their desired composite image, labeling the components of the composite (dog, ball, etc.). The software then searches for images that match the name and shape that the user specified, compares the foreground objects to background candidates for suitability (in other words, how easy they will be to composite together), and then creates candidate composites:
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Shooting hot-air balloons (and robot vacuum cleaners) with extended shutter times.
By Chris Meyer | October 07, 2009
The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is on right now, and it is truly one of the more joyous man-made phenomenon to shoot: hundreds of balloons of all shapes and colors from over 50 countries over a 200-acre area.
But as much fun as they are flying, even more fun for an experimental photographer is seeing them at night during a "balloon glow." After the sun sets, the pilots inflate the balloons (but keep them on the ground); the flames that generate the hot air also illuminate the balloons from inside.
And, even more fun than a balloon glow, is setting your camera to very long exposure times and experimenting with different camera movements.
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A new blog on using digital photography in abstract and mixed media art.
By Chris Meyer | September 30, 2009
Seeking to Understand I - Chris Meyer, 2009
"That's a photograph?!?" This is the usual response I get when I explain that the underlying image in one of my mixed media works is actually a photo of the real world. And I consider it to be a compliment.
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