Forrest Sign

Another one from the hike a few days ago!

Experimenting with using slight shifting to create a more 3d effect.

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Wait for it…

There’s a 5 second delay on the animation. My father has a film in the Sun Dance Film Festival this year. He was one of two cinematographers on the movie Blackfish. So, as of Friday he will be traveling down to Park City, Utah to partake in all the festivities!

This prompted him to want to update the picture of himself on his website. Which is where I came in. He wanted something that showed he was both professional, but still funny and good natured. This is what I came up with. Also, this was one of the rare times that I actually light and shoot people. Definitely a fun way to flesh out an idea’s been floating around for awhile. 🙂

On a side note, would anyone care to trade a couple RAW files? I would edit a couple of your photos, and you would edit a couple of mine. It would preferably be images that you and I have both already posted. I’ve been curious to do this for some time, just to see how different people handle the same material. It could be .jpg files to, I can work those almost as well as RAW. Comment to let me know and I’ll get a dropbox set up!

Fern Under Fall

As I’m sure most folks are familiar with, when roads are made in the mountains they often have manmade cliffs over them. These little cliffs almost always have delightful little falls or showers where streams that once flowed now fall. This fern was in on of these showers.

My umbrella was being blasted with water from the showers the whole time I was setting up and shooting. I have to thank my roommate for holding it and keeping me dry.

 

Spots of Color

My roommate and I went to explore the snowy mountains the other. And he kindly put up with me carrying my camera everywhere. We drove up a scenic highway to where it was closed for the year. The rest of the day was spent going though snow filled camp grounds waiting for springs warm embrace.

Orange fungus clinging to a frozen tree.

From wandering through a desaturated world, I quickly became obsessed with finding all of the remaining bits of color that I could.

The river still carried it’s emerald green.

These photos are just in the order that I took them through the day.

Though drab from far way, once you closed the gap to the pine trees they were evergreen

I did take a few very cool cinemagraphs too. I haven’t had the time to put those together. I’ll probably do one a day for the next four days so that I have time to work on other projects as well.

This lichen patch caught my eye right before we left.

Everything else I took was for cinemagraphs, so look for those over then next few days!

 

Once a Farm

So a short (slightly long) while ago I found and explored a now abandoned farm. I’ve been sitting on them not doing anything for a deplorably long time, but here a few at long last.

One of the cans inside the overgrown motor pool.

This is where I would normally have some sort of establishing shot to give context to the rest of the photos, but unfortunately the sky and light were poor enough that I don’t have any worth sharing. The upside however, is that through a bit of asking around, I was able to find out the history of that plot of land and learn why it sits as it does today!

There were two smashed cars outside the motor pool.

Up until about ten years ago this had been a working buffalo farm. On its last leg, but on a property with a fairly good location, it sold the whole plot to Walmart, who had every intention of building their next super duper store there. This is where I am missing some information. About eight or nine years ago they got as far as starting to get construction equipment there. Apparently they stopped rather quickly as well because the contractors trailer is still there, long since over grown with brambles.

This is against the back of the motor pool. I cropped the sly out because it was a grey mess.

After they ceased, it was all just left to the tides of time. In some places it was clearly an active place to party with beer cans sewn about. In the motor pool an owl now lives, speckling the floor with droppings and pellets.

The farm house itself has been burned down since then, and remains untouched.

A lot of the frame work of the house was still standing, though charred almost beyond recognition. There is still a large section of the second floor and the chimney and things attached to it remain in tack.

Right down to the wood inside the fireplace.

Once you start to move away from the heart of the house, there is less and less left standing.

Seeing straight back outside through most of the basement.

This was laying in some sticker bushes away from the house itself.

And finally, in lost in some deep grass, someone had to suffer from cold feet.

 

Post: I haven’t been very active on here the last few days. I’ve been exploring snowy campgrounds with my roommate, teaching my family how to snowboard, doing some hand illustrating, learning to make animated walk cycles, and starting to work on a large .gif project. So, I might be quiet for a few more days, but I’m still cooking away at projects.

Thanks for getting to the bottom of this!

 

Break One Thing

Another moving thing. I’m getting much faster at figuring out the type alignment and such. I think next I’m going to try to make a couple in AfterEffects instead of Photoshop to see if I can do more with them there.

The background is a photograph of  a smashed car outside of an abandoned loading warehouse.

 

You Are Beautiful

Here’s one of today’s projects. This was surprisingly difficult. With how easy it was for circles, I expected it to work the same, but keeping the type aligned was a challenge. I got it figured out just fine in the end though. 🙂

The background is a picture of an old shoe I found near an abandoned farm.

I’ll have the rest of the photos from the abandoned farm up soon!

What a Twist – Cinemagraph

Went back and experimented with a photograph. Building ideas for how this could be put to better use in the near future!

The photo is from the lake across the street a few days ago.

I want to work with these a LOT more. Very very easy, and very fun to make. From the start of post to the exporting of the .gif this took maybe 15-20 minutes.

The Kennels

A couple of more photos from visiting my grandfolks in the small town of Morton.

Somewhere in the area of 45 to 50 years ago, my grandfather was a hunting dog trainer.

No one in my family really talks to much about the kennels in particular, so I don’t know very much about them past their age an that they look hauntingly lovely now. The kennel and barn sit at the back of my grandparents property. I used to trek out to it as a kid in the summer, during which it involves traveling through many patches of stinging nettles.

Looking down the row of kennels.

 

Immediately looking the other was wheelbarrow long past its prime.

While most all things here are in some state of decay, the sign still looks like it was painted in the last couple years.

If you look at the full size image, you can make out the bush marks.

On a personal note, not that this should be surprising at this point, I love hand painted signs. Even when they are done with the utmost perfection, there’s always a human element that is almost impossible to recreate in a digital format.