Behind The Image, From Behind The Eyes

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As previously mentioned, one of the themes for this blog is to show how certain images were made. Even small things such as sharpening only a small area can make a huge difference in the overal look. So without further ado, I would like to introduce my (not original) series: Behind The Image. The first of which being: “Warping Reality with Puppet Warp“, revealing how I removed a fairly simple background nuisance using a copied patch of background and the Puppet Warp tool.

There are a lot of tutorials and how-to’s out there built around a lot of different kinds of images. I felt that if I stumbled upon something on my own, it might be good for others to see or if I combined a few techniques together to get a good result, that too would be worth sharing. I don’t have any rhyme or reason to the order in which these go up, unless of course it’s a large project, then I may split it up. A word of warning though, I don’t spend time going over the basics of everything I do. As I stated above, there are a lot of tutorials out there on YouTube, other blogs and popular online training websites such as Kelby Training. And books- lots and lots of books. If you see something that I do and you just don’t understand how, leave a comment and I’ll be more than happy to answer.

Lastly, I will be including a PDF of each Behind The Image post so that if you feel inclined to carry it around with you offline, you’ll have the option to.

Enjoy!

-Mike

I’m A Photographer, Not A Wizard!

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Maybe I just need to watch Harry Potter again and pay more attention… or do I need a wand? Surely my Wacom pen will suffice…

I spent numerous hours last night finding the right minimal WordPress theme and learning how to customize the CSS. I even bothered with learning how to make my own theme, but I feel that might have done more harm than good (to my psyche that is). Needless to say I learned a lot and if it wasn’t for my persistence for wanting to use the Google Fonts library, this whole ordeal would have gone much smoother.

With that the more projects like this that I try to accomplish myself, the more I realize the value someone has that knows how to do this properly. It’s not that I didn’t know they had value before, as I spent a few years learning the basics of HTML and CSS, but it has certainly been struck home after staring into the gaping maw of WordPress theme production.

It hasn’t been easy to wrap my head around it all, but it sure is rewarding when I refresh my page and see all the work I had done come to life. I’m not sure how much more of this I can do as the initial design and coding diverts a lot of attention away from my other projects. It has been great amounts of fun though, as one of the things I enjoy most in life is learning. While I have learned HTML and CSS in the past it had been quite some years since I touched it and since then I’ve learned many other things that pushed my previous knowledge aside.

Well enough of all that, the purpose of this blog will be to present my thoughts, workflows and techniques regarding photography. I hope you’ll enjoy!

-Mike