As with a number of the images here this is the result, not of pre-planning, but of disatisfaction with the original photograph. The original was taken near junction 21 of the M62 – on my way home from work – and, while the scene itself was quite dramatic, the picture was rather bland and lacking in contrast. Mind you, at 70mph in the pouring rain, it was rather difficult to concentrate on getting a good shot ;-)

Also, I think that there isn’t too much you can do to subtely manipulate a jpeg image without introducing noticeable artefacts into the final result. As such, it’s much easier to perform gross manipulations in that any changes are then intentional rather that by-products of the process itself – at least that’s my excuse.

So, basically, this image is the result of massively increasing the contrast in the image and I do like the way that it’s ‘lifted’ the road’s surface; i.e. the bouncing rain appears to have become a part of the road. The only other change I made was to use Photoshop’s ‘lens flare’ filter to add a bit more interest to the sky.

Over the years I’ve made numerous attempts to take a decent picture of a rainbow and, without fail, they’ve all been fairly poor; to say the least. This picture started out as yet another attempt – this time of a double rainbow – but as with my previous efforts this one was rather hopeless too. Obviously it is possible to photograph rainbows, but I’ve not managed to get it right thus far.

So, more as an excercise in exploring Photoshop than anything else, this picture is the end result. I can’t remember exactly what I did with this image (other than the final step, which was to apply a ‘plastic wrap’ filter) but it involved using the Channel Mixer to alter the colours, the Lens Flare filter, and some increase in both contrast and brightness.

Overall I quite like the end result, though, in this instance, it’s more down to protracted experimentation than creative vision; i.e. I had no idea as to how it would turn out when I started.

I did think about including the original shooting data but, given the massive changes to this image, there really didn’t seem much point ;-)

Other than a slight increase in saturation and contrast this image is much the same as the original. It was taken at around 6.30am, which is a time that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t be awake to see, but our two year old didn't sleep well and got me up just after six.

There isn’t anything particularly special about this image but it does capture something of the beauty of an early morning sky. And while it wasn’t a sufficiently rewarding experience to warrant me setting my alarm for that time every day, I am glad that I managed to take this picture.

Ideally, there should have been some foreground interest in addition to the sky, but we live on the edge of town and all I could have included was the backs of various houses or the bushes at the bottom of our garden – neither of which would have added much to this photograph.

This image started out as a not so interesting photograph of my wet footprints on the sandstone path in my back garden and was taken to accompany an entry in my main blog. The entry was concerned with the question of ‘where we stand’, particularly in terms of what grounds we may or may not have for claiming that one knowledge claim is better than another.

The image is the result of using Photoshop’s Stained Glass filter – once in the center of the image and again, using a smaller cell size, around the edge. While many of my recent Photoshop creations are the result of almost random experimentation (I suppose I’ll get the hang of using it at some point) I’m pleased with this image because it’s reasonably close to how I envisioned it.

The only problem with this image, at least as it’s presented here, is that the lines between the cells in the center of the image aren’t as sharp as they are in the original. Clearly there’s always some degredation of an image when it’s resized, but it’s particularly noticeable in this case.

This picture was taken on the way to our local park and is of me and our self-proclaimed ‘nearly two’ year old. The original background to the picture is a tarmac lane and, as such, wasn’t entirely suited to the mood I wanted to create. My aim was to capture something of the flavour of summer – crisp, bright shadows, warmth, light – and grey tarmac just didn’t work.

Overall, I’m pleased with this image but I think that I’d probably attempt a more subtle version if I were to do it again. While the versions here look ok, the much larger original does seem overly pixelated and would have probably benefitted from a slightly less rigourous increase in contrast. I recently had a version printed and it seem a bit clumsy (for want of a better word) when viewed on the printed page.

Nonetheless, it’s one of the first pieces of creative photography that I’ve done in quite some time so, on the whole, I’m pleased with the result.

This week's Photo Friday challenge – Analog – has caused me a great deal of problems, not least because a) I now only shoot digital, and b) I don't really like submitting something that I didn't take recently. I did shoot a roll with my £1.00 eBay purchase, a point-and-shoot Vivitar IC 101 panoramic camera this week, but all the shots were utterly crap. Anyway, rather than miss a challenge I decided to use this shot, the one and only 'analog' image on chromasia.

It was my first entry for this blog, but I don't imagine that all that many of you (other than myla) have trawled this far back through my archives, and was taken some time around 1993 on my Nikon F4 with a Sigma 70-210 APO lens. All I really remember about this shot is that it was the only one from about ten rolls that looked even half decent. The remaining 300 or so seagulls looked as though they'd either been shot, or suddenly paralysed mid-flight ;-)

(This entry was updated: 20th August, 2004).