Out to Pasture

[Christopher Miller]

Finally I had time to do a theme image! I took this at the farm where I work with the intention of making it into a fake tilt-shift image. After I did the blurring for the tilt-shift effect, I desaturated the image a bit and added a slight vignette to focus attention on the horse.

[Cheryl Slechta]

Christopher, this looks great! I'll have to figure something out - Florida is so flat and I was thinking of bird's eye view images but this gives me some food for thought.

[Ken Childs]

Christopher, it's a good subject and image for this technique and this one came out well. IMHO, this needs a significant increase in the amount of blur to really make us believe it could be a model. I upped the lens blur radius by 30 points and since models usually have brighter than reality colors, I also added some contrast and saturation and thought it looked pretty good. I'm looking forward to your next entry!

[Dennis Bishop]

Things have suddenly come into focus for me (or out of focus, maybe). I've never been a fan of the tilt-shift model effect. When I looked at the image last night, I thought it didn't look so much like a model, and that was fine with me. When I first look at an image, I want to get an overall impression without consciously considering any technical or artistic details. Then, I look at the composition in terms of proportions -- the aspect ratio to some extent and where the elements fall with respect to divine proportion lines. I don't want to blindly adhere to any guidelines, but if nothing else is compromised, the golden rectangle and divine proportions win out.

I opened a copy of the image and started playing around with composition. It changed the look considerably, but it was a personal preference thing, and I decided not to say anything about it. That's obviously changed. I'd ended up cropping away much of the sky and some from both the left and right edges. That, of course, made everything else larger. It wasn't until then that I noticed the blur in the foreground. Then, this morning, I read Ken's comment about the amount of blur, and I decided to see how much of a difference it would make with my version of the composition. It made a huge difference. And it was all positive. So much so that I actually have changed my view of the tilt-shift model effect. This has been a valuable eye-opener. And it shows me the value of the biweekly themes.

Interestingly, I just started (yesterday) reading Steal Like an Artist. This experience with the tilt-shift effect reinforces what the author presents about creativity. If you haven't been introduced to the book, I highly recommend looking at it. There's a lot online including at least one great video of the author making a presentation for Google employees.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Christopher,

Greetings. This one has all the right stuff but I agree with Ken that it needs a bit more blur... slightly darkened foreground might work, too.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Christopher Miller]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions, guys. I increased the amount of blur and adjusted the composition a bit. What do you think?

[Dennis Bishop]

I'm clearly no expert on this tilt-shift thing, but based on other examples I've seen and on the idea that there should be a focused band separating two regions that are intentionally blurred, I think one has to be binary about this. The blur should be very definite. Here's what I came up with, earlier. I used Alien Skin Bokeh, which provides a lot of possibilities. There are two masked layers of it -- one for the background and another for the foreground. I also angled the focused band to follow the contour of the ground upon which the horse is grazing so it emphasizes that slight diagonal element.

[denise ippolito]

Very intersting thread. I like your repost Christopher and I also like Dennis' repost (except it's a tiny bit tight on top). What I like about Dennis' repost is the swirled blurred look in the foreground. Nice work and processing.

[Andrew McLachlan]

Hi Christopher, I like Dennis' crop the best. Very nice work. The horse looks like one of those miniature horses. There are a few farms around my home that have several miniature horses..they are pretty cute.