Study Group 34 Phil Coleman

Study Group 34
Phil Coleman

Leif Alveen

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January

'A Cosmic Battle'

How I did it -

Animal original People original

Perhaps because of the hullabaloo over the Mayan calendar this year, a local gallery is calling for art derived from the "ancient Americas." I have some shots of petroglyphs that I took while on a rafting trip on the Salmon River in Idaho 2 years ago. As you can see in the originals, the drawings are rather muted, so first I had to greatly up the contrast of each shot. Then for the "animal" image, I added a black and white adjustment layer and moved the red and yellow sliders to max; and cyan and magenta to min. The adjustment layer and the layer below it were combined and given a blending mode of Luminosity, and the B&W layer hidden. The new layer and the original were then combined into a third layer which was given a blending mode of Divide. For the "people" image, a roughly similar procedure was followed but I made two upper layers, one with the red slider at min and then a blend mode of Difference, the other (top-most) with the B&W layer's red slider at max and a blend mode of Divide.

Finally, I started a new blank image, all white, twice the width of my originals. The people image was copied and pasted into the new image on the left in Normal mode. The animal image was copied and pasted on the right but with a Difference mode which gave its background the same dark blue as the people side. Stamping up to a combined layer, a little Clone Stamping then was used to smooth the boundary between the 2 halves. Getting this final result was more or less a random walk or perhaps "art by blind design".....

COMMENTS:

Steve Estill All hail the random walk! You've done well to bring these images together and made a good composite from what were pretty vague paintings well done. And well done for your obvious perseverance.

Candy Childrey
You've done a nice job in bringing out the detail in the two images. The blue background gives a nice feel to the texture of the wall. There seems to be too much red in the area around the people which gives it a feel of a big red spot instead of seeing the individual stick people.

Phil Coleman
I should have called the originals "pictographs."

Fes Parker
I have some images of ancient petroglyphs that I have never tried to do anything with because of the lack of contrast in the rocks and the art but I may try your procedure to see what I can come up with.

Christine Pollard

Georgianne Giese
You really brought those faded cave drawings back to life! Besides the fascinating subject matter, my heart is drawn to rock art of any kind. Rocks are beautiful in color and form, but much underappreciated in the world of photography. You have given me some ideas on what to do with my cave rock images!
Good job!

Leif Alveen
Impressive lengths you have gone to to make this image. Kudos for taking the idea and running with it. The final result doesn't really do anything for me, though. I dont think I would have gotten your idea behind it without the title and your description, which tells me that something is not good enough. Your color palette is fine, and maybe it will work fine on your living room wall.

Member Bio

Phil Coleman

A physicist by training, a photographer by passion, I am now semi-retired. For decades I used an Olympus SLR and slide film, but year after year I was using them less. Then over a year ago, I decided that digital was almost the equal of film and got a Nikon D300. The freedoms to take lots of images and throw away (at low cost!) most of them, to treat ISO as a variable, and to use the digital darkroom to convey or embellish what I saw/felt in the viewfinder have been wonderful.

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