Study Group 34 Leif Alveen

Study Group 34
Leif Alveen

Steve Estill

Candy Childrey

Phil Coleman

Fes Parker

Christine Pollard

Georgianne Giese

Leif Alveen

Home

January

'Perpetually Saddened'

How I did it -

Original

Really a simple image, and yet not after all. The basic image is a figure that is part of a sculpture in a hotel lobby. I was down on my knees and more to capture it as it was almost facing the floor. I guess people would have looked perplexed at me was it not for the fact that the hotel at that time was hosting the yearly conference of the Danish Photographic Society (SDF in local speak), so they were quite used to oddballs at the time.
I liked the rough expression but thought it lacked something, so I set to playing with textures. The cracks are made from a dry soil and a bark texture - both in overlay blend mode and about 50% opacity. The yellow tint is from a dirty yellow wall texture in color blend mode at low opacity. The colored splotches in the face are a paper texture with colored blobs and masked everywhere but the face - soft light blend mode at low opacity for subtlety. The latter is balanced by a tea stained paper texture masked out on the face. I shot all but the last two textures myself - stained paper textures isn't really worth the bother as the web is brimming with them. Final touches included sharpening and a vignette - mostly to hold back the upper right corner which was too bright to my liking.

COMMENTS:

Steve Estill
Excellent use of textures again. Well done. Only thing I'd suggest is some burning of the lighter background areas, and Redfield Face control (free download) to make him appear really sad, like this:

Candy Childrey
This is a good job with the many textures that you incorporated into this image. The line curving down from the left side under the eye gives the appearance of a tear. The nose seems to be a little less prominent than in the original.

Phil Coleman
Your enhancements to the original work for me. But the bright areas along the left edge, the top and especially the upper right are distracting. Try cropping or strong vignetting?

Fes Parker I like your idea but think the texture should be confined to the face only. I am fascinated by the original and like the coloring much better.

Christine Pollard

Georgianne Giese
As often before, you have outdone yourself with marvelous use of textures. It certainly is an improvement over the original sculpture! The colors and textures you chose really work well!

Leif Alveen

Member Bio

I was born and raised in the city of Aalborg in northern Denmark, and now, at 42 years of age, I still reside in the area. My regular job is driving a taxi, which carries the benefit of getting around the area a lot, which is useful when I tend to keep my camera bag close in my car or the taxi. Quite a few of my pictures are actually captured while at work. I do, however, occasionally find the time to go for a regular photo-trip, and enjoy forgetting time and place while I am out and about.

I have probably always been interested in photography, but it has been quite a bumpy ride. It all started with my getting a small and simple camera when I was about 10. I don't remember make or model, but it was made from a kind of cheap plastic, made square images, used a kind of cubic flashes you attached on top of it yielding one flash per side (of four) before needing replacement. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I took photography classes in the last couple of years of school, and enjoyed making pictures in a darkroom - a skill I have long forgotten by now. Later I mostly took family pictures, but was kind of limited by my wife who kept telling me to put down "that stupid camera" and not bother people with it anymore. The big break in photography came 5 years ago when I was divorced. One of the first things I did was buying a decent camera (at that time it was a Konica-Minolta Z6), and I never looked back.

Now I am on my third camera since rediscovering photography, the fabulous Nikon D700. I use it along with a range of lenses: 14-24, f2.8 - 24-70, f2.8 - 70-200 f2.8VR, all Nikkors, 105mm Sigma macro, 35mm Nikkor f2.0, and teleconverters for extending range when needed. Software is CS4 and Photomatix pro. I have been trying to get to grips with Hugin, an open source panorama stitcher as well. It is supposed to be capable of amazing results, but somehow I fail to achieve just that. Any tips would be appreciated. My computer is a quadcore with 4GB of RAM and two 1TB hard drives in a mirrored raid configuration (can't help being a little paranoid in face of a drive crashing and taking all of my precious images with it).

I have no special area of photographic interest. Usually I have periods with something sparking an interest, and after a period of exploring that I move on to something else. I do, however seem to be returning to low-light photography and lightpainting on a semi-regular basis. At the moment I am into panoramas and HDR as well.

I have a website at dreamcatcherphotography.eu, and feel free to peek if you like.

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