cmeyer

Welcome to the Hybrid Artist

2009-09-30T16:02:00Z

“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.

Ever since I was a kid with a cheap instamatic, I was interested in abstract photography, trying to remove the sense of perspective and scale in hopes you would view the result for only its forms and colors. Fast forward to today, and I can be found hiking around California plus the Four Corners region with camera and lenses in tow, still looking for interesting compositions to use as the basis of my art. (And no, it’s not “digital” art; there will be plenty of time to rant about that later…)

My aim is to use this blog as a journal of my adventures, including both the technical and artistic sides of working with digital cameras and images (with particular sympathy toward the semi-professional or enthused amateur looking to expand their horizons and raise their game), as well as creating archival prints on a variety of media. As moving media is my main job, the crossover between video and still photography will also occasionally enter the discussion. I’ll also be sharing links to some of the unusual things other people do with cameras.

If you’re curious about my tools, I’ve recently upgraded from a Canon 10D to a 5D mkII, and have a small assortment of Canon L zoom lenses plus a 100mm macro. I crop, color correct, sharpen, and occasionally composite these images on a Mac in a combination of Adobe Photoshop or After Effects (yes, the latter is a motion app, but I prefer its layered non-destructive model over Photoshop’s). Another recent acquisition is an HP Designjet Z3100 Photo 24” archival inkjet printer - after a long string of Epsons, it’s been an adjustment for better and worse. We also just acquired a Nuarc light exposure unit so we can create photogravure plates to run through my wife and partner Trish’s Takach etching press, for the ultimate high-tech to low-tech output path.

So as you can see, we’ll be covering a lot of territory on this journey. I hope you enjoy the ride.

One of my early abstract photos - Steelwind - taken well over 30 years ago with an instamatic camera. This image was shot up the side of a vehicular assembly building at Cape Canaveral.

A typical progression for me from original photo (fallen rocks in Tahquitz Canyon, just outside of Palm Springs) to final mixed media piece (Anthropologie, 2006).

It’s not all abstract! An example of my nature photography: Bees enjoying a Matilija Poppy bloom. I also take a lot of macro photographs of flowers, insects, and caterpillars.

Timelapse Motion Control

2009-11-21T04:43:00Z

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.

The video above is a quick look at the dolly; the two videos below are Vimeo preview of what Tom and Timescales is doing with it. (Also visit the Mountain Light page on Vimeo for links to more “behind the scenes” videos about the shoot.)

Timescapes Timelapse: Mountain Light from Tom @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Timescapes Timelapse: Learning to Fly from Tom @ Timescapes

Deconstruction 1.1

2009-11-01T16:50:00Z

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:

The original image - shot handheld with a Canon 10D and its standard 24-70mm lens, f=8.0, ISO 400, exposure 1/750 - is shown below. Since the 10D does not have an excess of pixels for high-quality prints, I tend to try to get close to the final framing when I shoot, rather than excessively crop an image later.

To help give the impression that portions of an image have been worn away, I like to use a stock library of “grunge textures” called Surface Toolkit. My friend Alex Lindsay created these by taking photos of distressed surfaces in Alcatraz prison, removing any natural lighting gradations in Photoshop, converting the images to grayscale, and editing them to be seamless tiles. Their main purpose is to be used as texture maps in 3D modeling programs to add aging effects to surfaces, but I like using them to treat text, photos, and video as well. The image below on the left is the untreated texture from Surface Toolkit; the image on the right is after I inverted it and used Levels to enhance its contrast:

I do my photo compositing in Adobe After Effects; it’s sort of a video version of Adobe Photoshop. I prefer to use After Effects because I have been using it since version 1, and it is completely non-destructive: I can change my mind at any time and get back to the original pixels. In After Effects, the above grunge image was used as a “track matte” applied in Silhouette Luma mode. As a result, the lighter areas of the grunge image knocked holes in the underlying photo, and darker areas were left progressively untouched. To further eat away at the outline of the building, I cut a mask (clipping path) along the roofline, and applied a plug-in effect called Roughen Edges to chew away parts of the roofline and sky. The result of the grunge matte and Roughen Edges are shown below: All of this distressing actually destroyed too much of the structure of the building for my taste. To re-strengthen the outlines, I applied an effect called Smart Blur, which normally is used to keep outlines sharp while blurring the areas in between. Smart Blur has a diagnostic mode where it shows you just the edges it has detected and plans to keep sharp. The resulting outline is exactly what I needed to re-establish some structure to my photo: These edges are normally white against black. I inverted the image, tinted the black lines a dark indigo, and applied the result on top of the weathered image using Linear Burn mode. I then removed some of the perspective distortion from the image using a Corner Pin effect applied to an Adjustment Layer above this stack (in newer versions of Photoshop, I’d use the Filter > Distort > Lens Correction instead). I also pumped up the saturation a touch. The final distressed image is show below: To enhance the weathering effect, I chose to print this image on Hawk Mountain Kestrel Brite White, which has a nice mould-made texture. Indeed, the texture of this paper - one of my favorites - helped inform my choice of grunge imagery earlier in the process. The image was printed at 200dpi on an Epson 2200 with stock Epson UltraChrome archival pigmented inks, using a custom printer profile provided by Hawk Mountain. At this point, this deconstructed image struck me as more closely resembling a blueprint or drawing than a photo of a finished building. This inspired me to reinforce the elemental look with additional graphic overlays. Rather than use literal blueprint symbols, I went through the “symbol” folder of our extensive font collection and chose the font Fibonacci designed by Tobias Frere-Jones for FUSE 10. I used the After Effects text tool and a randomized animation (frozen on a still frame, obviously) to create the cloud of characters pictured at right. This was printed out on transparency film, cut to a triangular shape to mirror the line of the roof in the upper right corner. To continue the elemental construction theme, I gathered together some washers, nails, window screen, and other bits of galvanized metal, cut them to fit the shapes present in the photo, and glued them directly to the print. I then floated the symbol overlay as well as strips of translucent Japanese unryu paper over the print by stacking up layers of mat board and adhering these elements between layers. The final result is shown below:

Deconstruction 1.1 - Chris Meyer, 2005

Around this time, my wife Trish had just joined the Collage Artists of America, and was planning to enter their Fall 2005 exhibit. I had just started playing around with these photo-based collages, and decided on a whim to also join - and enter my first two efforts (this piece being the second). To my surprise, both were juried into the show; to my shock, Deconstruction 1.1 was awarded second place! I don’t necessarily credit this to any brilliant artistic breakthrough on my part; I feel that when people are presented with something new for which they have no context to judge, they assume the unknown must be good (smile).

Since this piece, most of my distressing efforts have moved outside of the computer, and into the realm of printing onto unusual papers to get a less-than-perfect print. I’ll discuss those techniques in future posts.

Let It Snow

2009-10-29T04:56:00Z

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).

The hardest bit was figuring out what to focus on, as I wanted the flakes rather than the trees. I eventually used a nearby patio post to focus on, then swung around to take a picture out toward the trees. If nothing else, the result shows off the 5D mkII’s nice bokeh and “cinematic” shallow depth of field. (Click on the image above to open a double-sized copy.)

Not saying it’s a prize-winner (if I wanted that, I would have went outside and shot for awhile to get that “perfect” flake - it’s so hard to art-direct nature…); just sharing a fun seasonal diversion.

Project Icarus: Near-Space Photography for Under $150

2009-10-18T19:57:00Z

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?

One such project was recently undertaken by MIT students Justin Lee and Oliver Yee, who wanted to take photos of the earth from space. To do this, they used a weather balloon to fly a used Canon A470 to an altitude of over 17 miles. The camera was modified with CHDK open-source firmware to take a picture every 5 seconds. Skiing handwarmers were used to keep the electronics warm enough to keep functioning at those very high altitudes. A Motorola Boost i290 prepaid cell phone with extra batteries and an external antenna was used to provide GPS coordinates of where the camera landed after the flight. Total budget: $148.

More details can be found on the CNN web site (make sure you look at the photo gallery), in the CNN video below, and on the project’s official web site 1337arts - make sure you explore the links down the left side, such as Flight Pictures, Hardware and Pre-Launch.

Lee and Yee are not the only amateurs to photograph the earth from space; recently, a crew of four Spanish students pulled off a similar feat, and 1337arts has a page with links of other launches.

What stuck with me (aside from the sheer audacity of the project) was the aforementioned idea of using old cameras to get “impossible” shots - such as going over a waterfall etc. On the video side, when inexpensive DV video cameras first started appearing years ago (which were aimed at consumers, yet shot video good enough to broadcast), some crazy people such as Scott Billups started treating them as disposable cameras to situate where you would never place a human camera operator or an expensive camera - such as in the path of a monster truck.

Just sayin’...

PhotoSketch Image Montage

2009-10-08T18:23:00Z

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:

Overview from the web site of PhotoSketch’s creators Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir, and Shi-Min Hu from the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University, National University of Singapore, and The Interdisciplinary Center

It’s kinda spooky, and I would almost consider it a hoax (I was involved in a similar hoax concerning music composition at a CyberArts conference back in early the 90s), if it didn’t have a web site with examples, a SIGGRAPH paper, and even code examples to back it up.

After one gets over the incredible technological achievement, two issues come up: the creative, and the legal.

Creatively, one could look at this and worry about another potential instance of technology putting a human out of a job. Although the software shows good technical skills, obviously that indefinable “soul” is going to be missing. It is true that many will pay a modest to moderate sum of money for a photo (or photomontage) that displays good technical skills but no soul. And if it’s good enough for a consumer to spend that money, then it’s good enough, isn’t it? However, I would argue that photos that also display soul are the ones that fetch the higher price tags, and which cross that unseen line into being “art.” In turn, it means those just getting buy on technical skills may have competition, while those bringing something more may still have a place.

Legally, we have the old issue of people re-using images they find on the Internet. If the underlying image qualifies for copyright protection, then any image created using a portion of the original is deemed to be a “derivative work,” and copyright in the composite reverts back to the original image owner. (Yes, there is the fuzzy gray area of “de minimis” where you theoretically can get away with copying if you used an insignificant portion of the original, but I would argue that this algorithm is indeed using a significant portion of the original.)

If there is no copyright protection in the original sources, then the next question is whether the composite is the result of a process (which is the land of patent law), or if a person made creative decisions in the creation of the composite. If the latter is true, the person making the decisions is awarded copyright in the result.

Is the software making “creative” decisions? Before you say “No!” we have to ask the question whether or not the software’s creators were making creative decisions ,which were then embodied in their software. If you say “Yes!” we’re entering another interesting gray area where copyright in the result may revert to the software’s creators. In this particular case, I think protection under patent law is more likely (and there are patents on some image mosaic software out there); one would have to parse the actual software and see if the decisions being made are more akin the execution of a system, or creative.

But either way, I have long been fascinated by how much creative control has to be exercised by a person before the piece becomes “theirs.” Is it enough to define an algorithm which makes choices? Do we then give the photo caption credit to the software, or to the software’s creator?

Extended Shutter Fun

2009-10-07T17:10:00Z

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.

The images at the bottom of this post are full-frame and unretouched; they were shot by my wife Trish and myself at the Fiesta in 2006 with a Canon 10D plus their stock 24-70mm lens, 400 ISO, aperture times between 4.5 and 5.6, and with exposure times ranging from 0.5 to 3.0 seconds. The image here at left had an exposure time of 6.0 seconds.

Image at left by Chris Bartle
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13963375@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

By the way: What originally prompted me to post these is not just that this year’s Fiesta is currently on; it was a series of blog posts about photographers who take long exposure shots of their Roomba Robot Vacuum Cleaners; the image at left by Chris Bartle is an example. Make sure you check out their Flickr group.