Analog and Polaroid

I am working on two new series of images.  The first series is that of producing images that have an old school look and feel, that of analog photographs.

The second is the look of a polaroid.  

Both have been extremely fun to do and I plan on expanding the series of each.

Trash Abstract

Old Hands With Wrinkles

These are the hands of an Ifugao Indian womn in the 

Infugao Province, Philippines.  The province is located in 

far north on the main island of Luzon.

To me when I met her and looked at her hands they told

me a story of he life, how hard it was to work the rice

terraces, to survive.  

Originally I produced this is color but later decided 

to produce it in black and white which in ways gives 

the image more depth.

Below are both the black and white and color version.

This photograph would look great on any wall in the home, office, restaurant,

business lobby, hotel, in fact just about any interior.

It can be purchased at Fine Art America on both photographic paper and canvas

 at the link below:

New Website Up!

I just spent the last week doing what I thought would be a fairly easy task, updating my website. That was not to be the case.

With a lot of time on my hands, my arm still in a sling, one thing led to another and the end result is that I completely redid my website. I added new images, which would have been easy enough but I decided to complicate this by going back over hundreds of older files looking for images I had not used for one reason or another.

Then since so much of my existing web imagery was a couple of years old and feeling like I know a LOT more about using Photoshop now I thought it wise to start from the original RAW file and re-edit almost every image.

Turns out I am really glad I did both. The downside to my new knowledge is there just seem to crop (no pun intended) up those images that I can spend infinite amounts of time on playing with variations.

A good example is this image. I shot it six months ago and before finally saying, “okay this is it!” I must have started from the RAW file 25 times at least. I have a new appreciation for landscapes and photographers that shoot them.

Then I decided to change the type face of my header. I thought this would be quick and easy but I turned it into a full day of looking at type faces on what seems like every website that has them. Good news is I learned a lot about type...man there are some awesome type faces out there...there are also some really weird ones to put it nicely. Towards the end my eyes started to glaze over and at one point I even considered this, well for about a split second.

Probably a good decision since I don't want people to think of me as the chain saw photographer as a friend of mine put it.

I am using http://www.sitewelder.com/ as my host company and I can't say enough about the good people that run things there. They are amazingly fast to get back to me answering any questions I have and are also great about tweaking things for me when asked.

Here are a few other new photos I added:

What To Do With My Arm In A Sling??

So I have my left arm in a sling from the accident a week ago and I am starting to get bored. So I figured go through some old files and play with Photoshop. The one below I shot several years ago in Pagudpud on the cost of Luzon. I decided to bump up the saturation...a lot, and give it some grain i.e. noise, crop it and voila.

This one I did close to the opposite. I desaturated it and then added the noise.

Then I decided to go out n the deck and shoot some of the orchids my wife had just put out and convert them to B/W. Again I added some "grain".

Not sure the doc would approve quite yet but it was kind of fun just playing around.

Ocean Cleanup

This past weekend I covered the cleanup on Manila Bay here in the Philippines, part of an around the world ocean cleanup day organized by Ocean Conservancy.

The Cleanup began in 1986 in Texas and in 1989 the Cleanup went global with the addition of Mexico and Canada. Since then, the International Coastal Cleanup has grown to become the largest volunteer effort of its kind for the ocean. Last year alone, nearly 400,000 volunteers in more than 100 countries removed up 6.8 million pounds of trash at 6,485 sites along beaches, rivers, lakes and streams as well as below the water’s surface.

It was amazing to see the effort put into the day by so many people. Sadly the results, as good as they were, seemed hopeless as I watched another line of trash move in on an incoming tide just as the cleanup was finishing up.

Before the cleanup began you can see the amount of trash on the shoreline.

Just a fraction of the people helping Saturday.

The Philippine Coast Guard was on hand to help.

A new line of trash can be seen close to the horizon as it moves in with the incoming tide just as the cleanup is finished.

Marine debris (ocean trash) is more than an eyesore; it is a potential threat to our food supply, to tourism and economic activity, to marine wildlife and ecosystems, and to our own personal health and safety. It even relates to the ocean’s resilience and ability to adapt to the onset of climate change.