Diane

A new love inspires much...........

Picassa 3 is a neat program to experiment with. I don't normally use the "retouch" function (which allows for the removal of blemishes, etc). This lady's face did NOT need THAT! However, when I moved the brush width to maximum and disturbed the image slightly on the right portion of her face I noticed that the right side locks of her HAIR jogged to the left at a certain critical location. I'd restyled her hair electronically!

COOL! I said to myself, and saved the result. I cropped her face tight and applied sharpening, film grain and messed with virtually all the other effects to get what you see. Note that I definitely altered the color temperature... this allows a lot of surprising color effects to pop out when a picture has been sharpened (which increases contrast and depletes the number of discrete pixels... kind of an Andy Warhol effect.)

Every image is a combination of two things... shape (or form) and color. A photograph is not a single image but thousands of individual images (call these pixels if you want) arranged in some organized way. Our eye captures this organization and our brain compares it with previous experience stored in memory. That's seeing.

Is seeing believing? Maybe, maybe not... but when you see something that strikes a deep chord within you (in the case above: beauty, life, joy) it translates to emotion. You are either attracted or repelled by striking photowork. You are never bored!!

Siri and Grover Make Friends

Siri made a visit to Gail's place (grandma Gail often looks after Gemma and Siri) and Gail took a couple shots to let me see with my own nearsighted half-retinal eyes how big a hit Sesame Street's Grover had been. "She wouldn't let go when she left," Gail informs me. "They're probably fighting over him right now."

I hadn't intended to cause a sibling battle, figuring there was also Elmo hanging around to even things out, but novelty does strange things to women. Of ANY age...

Photography: Gail Slaughter

Editing: Michael Serafin

Little Things...

Fort Humboldt Steamer Ride

Gemma's Catta-Pillar

Be it Ever so Humboldt...

It hardly seems possible but it's been going on two years that my friend Gail moved out to California to be with her daughter Wendy at the birth of her twins Siri and Gemma. I get occasional photog evidence. Now I see the twins walking, talking, and enjoying life to the fullest. These pictures were taken at Fort Humboldt Park. Wendy is in the lower shot, right.

She's got Gemma, the caterpillar enthusiatist, on her lap.

Photography by Gail Slaughter

Editing and effects: Michael Serafin

Phairy Philosophy

photo: Gail Slaughter

text: Michael Serafin

Spiders' Dews and Don'ts

photo: Gail Slaughter
text: Michael Serafin

Mermaid Manipulation

From time to time I post stuff both in E in P and in Nerd Shots, my site dedicated to Computer art which is to say, pictures that have been enhanced or altered or invented inside the electronical box.

This image was taken from a photo Gail Slaughter sent me from her garden in California. She is usually on the lookout for fairies and elves that paint leaves but here she caught a Mermaid sunning herself. Well, in the sea, they sort of have filtered sun, you know? In the area of California where Gail resides they have much more cloud than sun.

I used Microsoft Photo Editor to smudge and sharpen and then smudge again to create the weird sandy/watery texture and then used Picassa to progressively tint the picture, warmify, etc etc etc. I forget what all I did, but if you fool around with Picassa, you can too.

photo: Gail Slaughter

effects: Michael Serafin