The reason behind this is that I decided to move the domain under a new webhotel and the transition didn’t go anywhere as smoothly as I hoped, resulting with a domain that was sitting on nothing for a full week. The situation was a tad irritating as there was nothing I could do about it.

Anyway, happy ending, everything is back online and running normally again. Sorry for any inconveniences during the downtime.

Sure, it is something that can be done with Photoshop and the likes, but it was somehow a refreshing change to see the results on the fly and skip the post-processing stage which can tend to get time consuming.

Below a few selected ones, straight from the camera as is (aside from rescaling them).

Perhaps I should play around with these kinds of settings more often to get even more out of my camera (and that way more refined results).

About half a year ago, chatting in a bar with a friend who is a member of a ambient-industrial-noise band called Älymystö, it became apparent they didn’t have enough music videos to promote their music, only one to be exact.

As I thought about it afterwards, I remembered I did have some old live video material I took during one of their live gigs years ago in a small live venue in Helsinki. Since I had iMovie ’09 installed on my MacBook Pro, I decided to give it a try what I could come up with it.

Overcoming technical limitations

So there was roughly 15 minutes of video from two separate live performances in the same venue (Factory, which sadly closed its doors two years ago). It was taken with a Sony DSC-717 digital camera and the resolution was a modest 320x240. Since the video was in plain mpeg-files, I immediately had the problem of getting them imported into iMovie, which didn’t support the format. Even if it did support it, I would still have the problem with the next to unusable low resolution of the raw material.

Then I got an idea. I picked up my new Canon IXUS 860 IS digital camera, start playing the original videos on my monitor full screen and re-record them into new video files sized 640x480 resolution. Basically I was already editing video for the final version by panning and zooming around the screen while making sure the focus won’t get too sharp to reveal the technique with monitor pixels.

Syncing with the music track

Once I had enough material, I imported the new material into iMovie which it accepted with no problems. Since iMovie was basically aimed for home videos and not accurate sync-editing with sound (in this case music), I picked a track from the band that didn’t have singing, as it would otherwise have been a major headache to find clips that fit with them sync-wise.

Even without vocals the process of syncing audio with video was a bit awkward with iMovie, but my enthusiasm was greater than the frustration and after two evenings I managed to come up with a something that might be called a low budget fan music video.

Rewarding project

The band wasn’t aware of my doings and were happy to find out one of their tracks got wrapped up in a video when I gave them a look. Now, after five months or so, it got put online on YouTube by the band itself.

Making the video was fun, although I will think twice about doing another one with iMovie. As simple as it is, it wasn’t meant for making music videos. Also, I’d like to use material in a much higher resolution next time.

Given the crippling limitations of source material, editing software and even the fact I rarely play with video, the result was still quite pleasing. It’s nothing professional by all means, but I wasn’t expecting it to be. Anyway, here it is:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fec4CgGYciQ

Here are a few photos I took while taking a walk in a park a few days ago. They turned out a tad surreal I thinks.

It turned out this was the faulty one (most photos from the top were also underexposed due to the apparently badly positioned mirror), so I’ll be using the other one next time. Here are some selected (untouched) photos. Feels refreshing to play around with old-fashioned film again.

In these particular scrubs I was focused on photo retouching (playing with colours and contrast mainly).

There are lots of scrubs lying around my hard drives, so I might dig some out for display in future posts.

Basically ever since I bought and used my now broken 35mm/2.0 lens with my Digital EOS camera, I aimed for crisp, clean photography. While I managed to capture good photos, somehow I lost track at some point what photography is all about (or can be). Surely it isn’t about how sharp the pictures are, but how they touch the viewer, right?

The noiseless, detailed photos that a large portion of my photos are about were at times … static. They didn’t always seem to encapsulate any kind of mood. Sure, the photos seen in Flickr hardly have any people in it (for privacy reasons), but not even living things are required to evoke a feeling in a photo.

So I selected some random photos that I never would have considered publishing as-is and with a little help from Photoshop, did an experiment of trying to inject some life into them by blurring and off-setting some colours. Making them fade away with time like visual memories in one’s head.

The experiment reminded me that at the end of the day, flawless image quality doesn’t always raise chances that the photo will be more interesting. In fact, sharp, clinical photos sometimes leave no space for any emotion to breath in. Pretty basic stuff, but somehow I forgot about that.

I’m clearly not abusing my photos with Photoshop enough.

Over a month ago, one afternoon while just idling on my sofa wondering what to do, I suddenly got up, grabbed my Wacom-tablet’s pen and started to draw something in Photoshop. It didn’t matter what, I just wanted to do something creative instead of wasting the day away.

After some no-brainer sketching, I ended up with some simple black’n'white figure. A rather typical sketch from someone (or at least me) who hasn’t got an idea in advance what to draw.

The initial sketch I did with my Wacom Intuos2 and Photoshop CS3 (A4 sized).

I didn’t want to stop here however and call it a day, and decided to see how far I could take this within one day.

Adding flavour

I then added colours and gradients to the file, fooling around with saturation and contrast settings in order to find the right harmony. I continued using the wacom tablet by “filling” the body pencil-like as well as drawing an extra line pattern in the lower background in order not to let the figure feel too isolated from the background.

Finally, I used the wave-filter to give the background some kick (cheap trick, but good enough for now).

Added layers with colours and textures.

Motion with Flash

Looking okay. I could have continued tweaking and adding stuff to the image, but then I thought this would be a good opportunity to transfer it into Flash and animate it.

So I made a new re-sized file from the original and imported the psd-file into Flash CS3, which nicely preserved the layers as they were in Photoshop. I wanted to animate it like was magically drawn on the canvas, so I used a masking layer on each of the layers, first hiding all the layers, then gradually frame by frame revealing more and more detail.

The choppiness of the animation technique didn’t bother me that much, since I was looking for a simple but quick solution. Some colour-layers I animated only with the alpha-values (from transparent to solid colour). As a final touch, I added a heart to give the work some kind of message.

And below we have the finished image (click the animation to rewind it)!

Go with the flow

So from sitting on the sofa doing nothing I came up with a rewarding animation. The whole process took some 6-7 hours and while it serves little purpose, it was fun to create and that was enough for me.

Sometimes it is important not to try to think in advance what should I create, just grab a pen and see what happens. This is something I learned very well when I practiced painting with watercolours. Just follow the flow, then analyze its direction and tame it down.

The result is always at its very least something formed from emptiness. I’m always fascinated by that simple fact.

The ones displayed here are the only ones I happened to scan. I’ll try to scan more of them later. Although I’m rather satisfied with these, I still consider them more like practice paintings rather than serious attempts. And they are mainly done just for fun anyway.

These were painted on A4 sized paper (300g/m2). I usually paint on bigger ones, but for this visit smaller sized paper was more convenient. “Hiljainen virtaus” (“silent stream”) and “Lämpimän tuulen neito” (“lady of a warm breeze”) were quite spontaneous paintings, while “lehdet” (“leaves”) was first sketched on a notebook.

Maybe it will happen now since I broke my trusty EF 35mm f2.0 lens, which I’ve been using 99% of the time since I bought it two and a half years ago.

Lake scenery in North-Karelia, Finland.