Into The Milky Way

Or a larger version:

Buildings in Heavy Fog

Fog Rows

Ghosts

Lost in the tree

Sinking Away

Lost Fence

Fog Sunrise over Spruce

Do you have a favorite? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Me!
@chrislanepd


Leslie Moroney
@lamcreate
www.lamcreate.com

Jeremy Cupp
@JeremyCupp
www.jeremycupp.com

Bryan Dockett
@Dockettphoto
dockettphoto.com

Jenna Petrone
@heyjennuh
www.jenna-petrone.com

Eje Gustafsson
@Eje_G
straylightdata.com

Gary D Chapman
@garydchapman
www.garydchapman.co.uk

Loc Lam
@yaadayaada
locnessdesigns.com

Pete Glogiewicz
@PeteGlogiewicz
Pete on Flickr

Reem M
@reemistry
Reem on 500px

Chris Maskell
@ChrisdMRF
chrisdmrf.wordpress.com

Chris Nitz
@chris_nitz
www.chrisnitz.com/

Jeremy Cupp (again, he was feeling rather uninspired the first time around, so I gave him a second chance>

Here I finished out the whole project.

And finally, here are all the images together next to each other in order to see the progression a little more clearly.

So what do you think of that? I had fun with the project, but it lasted a really long time. It started back at the end of August 2012, so that makes it nearly 7 months along. Next collaboration will have to be a shorter project like the previous one. Do you like these? Should I do another collaboration project?

So, before the event I just email these out and then when people show up they get a free print on 12×18 matte heavy weight paper. I get these printed at my local print shop, Quick Print. They always turn out fantastic and I really like working with them.

Zombie Night 5

transcript: “Once again in about one months time on February 11th, the zombies will arise once again to try eat your brains. You must fight back or become one. Join the resistance at the Lane Estates at 6:30PM. Fight through the swarm in Dead Nation or survive in Dead Ops for PS3. Escape alive in Zombies!!! the board game. Now with Zombie clowns! Then Laugh your human face off at their ridiculousness in Video Dead the movie. Enjoy the night, just be careful. They are everywhere you turn.”
and over the top “Run while you can!” with a hand print.

These are the things we enjoyed that night:

Zombie Night 6

This next one I wanted to escalate the personal message a little bit. So I wrote a little fake message to each of the people invited. Sometimes the message was written from an actual person, sometimes it was just a fake signature.

transcript: The zombies rise again. They feast on human flesh. Beware the apocalypse and prepare June 2nd. Arm yourself for battle. it all begins 6:30PM at The Lane Estates. Feast your eyes on the beauty and horror of The Gore Gore Girls from 1972 and laugh at the man with a fetish for smashing melons. Then attempt to escape the hoard in Zombies!!! the board game, now with dogs, the glowing ones, kids, and the granny+more! Traverse a city, a circus, the woods, a cemetery, and a secret military base. Will you survive?
and over the top: Brian, this is just like that one time at that one place. Remember? – L Jamie, just got a hummer, a 12 guage, and a sword. I’m like the M.F’ing Pter-O-dactyl! – C Charlie, sorry we left you back there. I thought you were infected. We’ll be at the place if you make it. Good luck – Corey, Turn back! don’t go to the meeting place, its swarmed see you in the next life – Dana Matt, I give up. I hope you do better – me Jeff, that place we talked about, it’s fully stocked. I’m headed there now – steve Sam, too bad about dad, but at least he left us a pile of guns. I’ll leave you a few. – C Joh, Pray for us. Joe was bit. One bullet left. I love you – Becky Brent, having the time of my life! see you soon! – T

These are the things we enjoyed that night (actually we never watched the movie and this time we skipped any video games):

Zombie Night 7

With this poster I decided for the words that I would use quotes or paraphrased quotes from various zombie and horror movies. Also, this time I wanted to go even more over the top and realistic. I wanted these posters to look they had seen some real action. So I decided to attack a part of it where I had printed some blood with an axe and shoot out part of the lower corner with bird shot from a 12 gauge shotgun (the classic zombie gun of choice, of course!). Luckily I live on a large rural property and i could just do this in my backyard. To show how these really looked for the people that got them, I took a photo.

transcript (see if you can guess the movies quoted): There is no more room in hell so the dead have begun to rise. in other words, they’re coming for you barbara! Beware, the fright night 0908 they will walk at 630pm. It all begins with Planet of the Zombies* (*err…vampires) if you haven’t turned zombie simply from fear and have a handy change of pants then proceed to fight for your life in Zombies!!! the modified board game. beware though, those they kill, get up & kill. While you’re at it, send…more…paramedics.

at this point we have modified the Zombies board game with so many house rules that it really has nothing to do with the original game besides the pieces anymore. We have added other pieces from this coin vending machine set. They apparently are also available on amazon

Zombie Night 8

The final poster of the year. How do I top the rest? At this point it was clear I needed real blood incorporated into the poster, not just printed. So I mixed up some corn syrup base blood from a recipe on this site and applied it to the posters with an added slash across the center. The nice thing about this particular blood mix is that when it dries it becomes candied. So it still looks just like it did when it was wet, thus making the posters appear to have fresh blood on them. Pretty demented, but perfect for the theme. Again, to give the best example, I had to take a photo to demonstrate.

transcript: Zombies everywhere. no hope for survival. do you give up and fall to the incessant waves of undead or do you arm yourself and fight. if you think we still have a chance, join me nov 30th @ 630pm at Lane Estates and battle like you have never battled before. take notes on their behavior in the film Fido, as this may be our last chance for humanity.

we unfortunately missed out with Fido, as it was no longer available on instant on netflix, so we found some other stupid zombie movie instead.

So that was the years worth of zombie posters. What did you think? Do you have a favorite? Did you prefer the illustrated posters from last year? Do you have a suggestion for an upcoming year in style? I think for 2013 I will be doing a movie style photo poster, but I haven’t made any of them yet.

I think this one turned out particularly disturbing, but I think it’s mostly the one wide eye. I laughed a lot while I was working on this; it is a lot of fun. Let me know what you think in the comments below!

Tristan Defaced

Cold Night Moon

My wife has very long straight hair and Georgia had rather short hair with a wave to it. Georgia also wore a pearl necklace, which we did not have. Melissa did up her hair as best she could and we made a necklace out of a string of Kix cereal pieces. In real life, the necklace certainly didn’t look like pearls with their uneven shape and the color was way off, but I knew I was going to convert to black and white and I could fix some of the roundness later. It should work great at least as a place holder.

So, keeping an eye to the shadows in the original photo I set Melissa in the same kind of lighting. At first I wasn’t getting the shine on the waves of the hair quite the same, so I set up another light for highlights. I positioned Melissa as close to the same position and she tried to do the same sort of non-smile as Georgia.

As Georgia by Chris Lane

After the photo was taken, I converted it to Black and white with a black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop. I like this form of conversion because, instead of converting to grayscale, I can manually adjust the dark/brightness of the different colors on their own. After that I did some minor dodging and burning, adjusted the contrast with a curves adjustment layer, and finally put a layer with noise over the top to give it an older look.

I asked Melissa if she wanted me to Photoshop her appearance to look more like Georgia, particularly her neck is longer, but we decided to just leave it be. I think it has more meaning that she is herself and comes from Georgia, rather than just making her look like Georgia.

Overall, I think the recreation was a good success. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below.

The Colors Collide

Issues in the metadata

Here is the metadata from the image: 255Kb (in the original that he posted on his website), shot on a Canon 400D/XTi with an EF28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 USM lens. It was shot at ISO 200, f/11 and 1/80th of a second. The focal length was 28mm.

In the metadata I can see a couple things generally wrong with this. First, the size of his file. This is minor, but I know for an image that is only 900px wide, he should be able to compress that file down a lot more without any issues. If he is using Photoshop, he should be using the Save for Web function instead of the Save As function. The file sizes will be dramatically smaller. This isn’t an issue with the photo itself of course, but in the scheme of things it is important. If he wants his website found, Google does use page load speed as one of it’s parameters for search results.

Second thing from the metadata, the wide angle of the lens. He is shooting at the widest setting of his lens. There are a couple problems with this. First, taking into account the crop factor of his camera of 1.6 x 28mm, the shot is at 44.8mm. This isn’t too bad for portraits, but I would recommend going a little higher. Unless I am going for a particular odd look I try to stay at minimum of 50mm. Since he was using a standard zoom lens, he should have dialed his lens up to just over 31mm. This isn’t terribly easy on a lens that isn’t exactly marked, but if he had backed off just a little it would help. I recommend most portraits to be shot around 85mm for the best, most flattering look to the subject. So, on this lens he would have had it around 53mm.
Second problem with having his lens at its widest setting is that most lenses, particularly cheaper lenses, function at their sharpest in the middle ranges of the zoom. This isn’t always the case, but most of the time it is. He did use a nice high aperture, so that should help.

Composition & cropping

On to the actual image. The overall composition is pretty nice. Pete is playing to the rule of thirds quite closely. The nice thing with this image being on a black background, he could play around with this a little more. Just as an experiment, I add some extra to the image to see how it would look with some more space behind the fairy and placing the prominent subjects more precisely on the thirds intersections. You can see the original and the modified versions below.


This isn’t necessarily better, but it does give more room to the fairy. This isn’t quite the same dimension ratio anymore though either, so it could run into some problems with printing. For the rest of the critique, I will be working with his original crop, however. This was just kind of an experiment to show different results using the same rules.

I guess in the images above, you can see one of the other things I changed to the image was I completely removed the white glow over the whole thing. I think it was unnecessary. I understand he was trying to go with a glow from the fairy, but the glow from such a small source wouldn’t be so extreme. In my quick fix, it left a little bit of glow around the stardust and the fairy and even some around the little girl which I think is sufficient for effect. The entire thing was just far too extreme.

Movement

The image has some pretty nice movement through it, though it’s not perfect. In the image above, you can see with the aid of the frickin laser beams how the eye will travel. The viewer’s eye will most likely originate at the eyes of the subject. As humans, that is the first place we connect and naturally the most interesting part of the image. So, the little girl’s eye is traveling nicely up to the fairy, along with the hand. When I first looked at the image, I didn’t think it went straight there, though. This may be due to the angle of her head. The eye is small and almost entirely profile (from the side) so it is hard to see clearly where it is traveling, but her head almost looks like it is bent more up with her eyes slightly down. Maybe that is just me seeing that. Anyway, after the eye travels from the girl to the fairy, the strongest direction you would go next is along the stardust trail. One foot of the fairy helps the eye go this direction, but the other goes up in the wrong direction. It is small enough it really isn’t a big deal, but it does detract from the movement of the image. The problem at this point is the stardust trail just goes off the image without bringing the eye back around. The posture of the girl on the other hand, could be catching the eye if the crop was slightly lower, catching more of his lower left arm. The horizontal line at the bottom of the image is almost there, but not quite. The left arm does bring the eye up from the bottom, up to her hair, and the cut of her hair brings the eye back to her eye. So the only way I see to improve on the movement here (disregarding the fairy foot point up) is to add some more stardust toward the bottom as I demonstrate below very quickly.

The Fairy

I like and don’t like the fairy at the same time. The position is good, the outline is good. I just wish it was more than a flat splotch of light. I like that it is supposed to be emanating light. But I just wish there was a little more to it. Pete told me it was a custom photoshop brush that he used to make it. In my altered version below you can see I added in a very small amount of quickly drawn in detail and color. This was just a quick solution. I likely would have used another image to compose in instead, but I couldn’t find one that I really liked quickly enough. I didn’t do a great job of it, but I think the detail does help a little.

The lighting in the photo is great. It definitely hits the subject of the portrait in the right way. Or at least close. The light source doesn’t quite look to be the fairy based on the way the light hits more of the underside of the palm of the girl. The face looks good though. I’d like to see the original unedited version of this shot from Pete to see exactly where the light is in comparison to the fairy.

Finishing up

Other than those changes outlined below, I just did a little burning of the image under her chin and by her hair to make the value change more significant. I removed the sparkles that were around her hand, they seemed distracting. I removed a small patch of hair that was coming in front of her mouth as well. Finally, i desaturated the flower on her shirt to some degree. It was far too bright and colorful and it took attention away from the subject desired. I made it a little closer to the color brightness of her face.

Overall, it was a great idea and a good image that could be better. I made some quick changes and made it a little closer to how I think it would look better. Below you can see the original again and my altered version. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below, which looks better? are my changes way off base?

I encourage you to visit Pete’s website here and get in contact with him on twitter, he is great to chat with. And if you would like a critique of a work of your own, send me a message with my critique submission form.

Original

My quick alteration

Then I looked around for something else to draw from and we had a framed antique photo of a couple that I am presumably related to. I don’t really know them, as it is quite an old photo, but I know it came from my grandmother’s box of photos. Anyway, this is Mrs. John Holm. She sure was a handsome woman!

Finally, I filled a page with some surreal stream of consciousness type sketching. I’ll leave the interpretation up to you, though I have my own ideas.

I’d love to hear what you think of that sketch. Can you make up a story of the thoughts behind it? Sound off in the comments below.