An American Peyote Scribble

How was that image created?  What was the workflow from the initial idea to the finished product?  Concept to Photo is a growing collection of articles detailing how various images were produced, starting from the initial concept stage through to the final image.  What worked, what didn’t, could the concept be translated to an image, and how successful was the experiment?  This installment includes the development of the Urban Dry Tooling Concept: the perfect mix of climbing coolness and the industrial edge.

The Concept:

I’ve been moving towards combining climbing and urban concepts for a while.  It’s a natural result when you have little time to climb and too much camera equipment combined with a night of self-portrait experimentation.  Everyone knows what the generic city mountaineer looks like: jeans, fuzzy hat, fleece gloves, cool sport sunglasses, Teva or Chaco sandals in the summer and hiking boots in the winter, all topped off with an expensive Gortex jacket fit for Nepal but mainly used to fend off the wind in front of Starbucks.  I’m not an exception, except that I keep the boots at home in favor of Dr. Martens.  Anyways, I wanted to take the Urban Climber/Mountaineer look a bit further than the coffee shop.




The concept started with a sketch and was simple, take the best parts of Urban and combine with the edginess of mountaineering.  I wanted something sort of dramatic, I wanted movement (or the sense of it), and I wanted it to look cool (at least to my eyes).  For the Urban part this meant that dark industrial backdrop only available from a circa 1940’s sky scape or an old factory.  It also meant fashion and not just taking a mountaineer and putting them onto the side of a building.

I wanted the coolest elements from mountaineering: ice tools, quickdraws, well-fit jacket, cool hat, and sunglasses – and then combine with a clean hip urban look.  Unless you ice climb you probably know what an ice axe is but don’t have any idea what an "ice tool" is supposed to look like.  Ice tools are short and meant for climbing frozen waterfalls or hanging from rock edges in winter.  They’re curved, wicked and stylish.

The clean hip Urban look was realized by integrating jeans and super-fly Dr. Martens into the mix.  The location was an old industrial area, in conjunction with a zuerichflickrdrinks Flickr group outing.

The Location:

The old industrial Sulzer-Areal complex in Winterthur, just outside of Zurich, Switzerland.  Originally a manufacturing complex, since transformed into an ultra-chic locale with apartments and one fantastic parking garage which is largely unused on the weekends.

The Wardrobe:

Mountain Hardware Jacket
Levis Jeans
Dr. Martins wing tips
Bolivian Hat
Trango Captain Hook Ice Tools
Random Accessories (quickdraws and ice screws)

The Execution

The original idea was to hang on to the columns of the parking garage with the ice tools and be pulled by a rope attached to the harness.  Then the model could have his legs pulled out into space or jump out.  This actually seemed a lot more dangerous in real life with actual steel and concrete to bash his head into – and hence was scraped as an option.  After killing that notion static posing on the steel column in classic climbing fashion became the main focus.  Assisting with the camera was done by ubiquity_zh.




Sometimes the lighting dominates the subject and other times very simple lighting is paired with a subject.  There are a number of things which could have been done better, like lighting the steel column or mixing soft overhead light with some hard lights for contrast, but in the end a simple (somewhat pathetic) one umbrella setup mixed with the natural light filtering through the ceiling was used.  A Contax TLA280 was reflected into an umbrella high camera left and a 20 mm lens was used to get some slight distortion and bring out the Dr. Martens when the feet were properly positioned.




The Processing

Dodging and burning was used on the jeans to bring them out.  Then various curves, high-pass and levels adjustment layers were used to stylize and a deep green color was added with a fill layer.  Layer masking was used where appropriate to bring back facial features lost in the layers.  A grung texture was produced from the concrete in the factory and used as the final step.

The Debrief

The images from the Urban Dry Tooling shoot were ok, more or less what was wanted, but in many ways don’t really pop in the way intended.  On the one hand this is good, it means the photographer is not egotistical to the point where he’s fooled into thinking that crap photography is fabulous because he designed it.  On the other hand it means one can see the road of improvement.

One main problem is the poor separation between the black Mountain Hardware jacket and the background.  A light grey jacket or T-shirt would have absorbed less light, and would’ve rendered better defined shadows.  Furthermore, a diffused light from the right would have illuminated the torso of the model better.  Of course, adding some back-lighting would have helped as well to improve separation, and grid spot to light the ice tools probably would have prevented them being lost in the shadows of the steel framework.  What comes next?  Only the Shadow knows.

There has and is and maybe always will be a problem with the internet and media production. What you see on your monitor might not be what another person perceives. A deep dark red rose might be engaging for me and lack a certain depth for someone else.

On going research at Media Technology dept. at Empa, a research center in Switzerland is currently testing an online image evaluation system. The test is simple, you go there, click through a few calibration images to calibrate the test to your monitor according to their standards, and start looking at images. Some images will look good to you, some will seem not right. You pick the image you like and in the end a better print algorithm will be developed.

This may sound simple, but it’s a fantastic platform for the future. It means the possibility to set up a testing environment for images and colors for a multitude of media. The more participants the better, and by taking this quick exam you will be contributing to cutting-edge research into how colors and images can be evaluated using the internet.

Online Psychovisual Test

The Project is headed by the smart, talented, and amazingly beautiful Iris Sprow (pictured below):




Those who are working with images, are familiar with the difficulty of color representation in computer systems: one captures an image, scans it, or already has the file on his computer, works with it, saves it, puts it up on the Internet-and suddenly colors look differently than intended. When looking at the Internet page, colors appear yellowish in on the office monitor, they look too dark on the beamer of the colleague, dad’s laptop alters the bright colors blueish and grandma’s plasma display gives an overall pastel appearance.

This has to do with each monitor’s adjustment, with the system used, with the image processing program, the browser, etc. This is how the Internet works at the moment and is exactly what we want to take advantage of. Our research group tries to use this circumstance to draw conclusions to quality estimations and employed standards. Normally, for such ‘psycho-visual tests’, people are invited to evaluate a bunch of images in a darkened, standardized room on expensive high-end displays. This is a very costly and time-consuming task which leads, amongst other things, to why the issue of color, particularly in computers, still is not solved to a common satisfaction. We are trying to create such tests more efficiently by having the user investigate images at home on his own computer.

For this, we are looking for volunteers who take part in this test; since the start last week about 150 people already took the test. It is simple and takes, depending on enthusiasm, ten to twenty minutes and has no side effects. The test is available in English, German and Polish, all information is stored anonymously. There is no right or wrong; we are simply trying to find out how the average Internet user evaluates images.

The research group of Empa’s Media technology department and especially the project leader Iris Sprow would be glad if many ECI members would participate in the test; of course all others are encouraged as well, family, friends, etc.

Link to the test:

http://www.empamedia.ethz.ch/

-Iris Sprow

What if some freak accident fused the awesomeness of Photoshop with the web-coolness of Flickr?

Bow down Earthly photo-crazed mortals, for the Divine ones from the digital sanctuary have again blessed us with new gifts.

Photoshop Express

The cosmic programmers at Adobe seem to have taken the best of Photoshop and Lightroom and fused those excellent image editing and browsing tools with the goodness of Flickr.

With a free Photoshop Express account one gets 2 GB of storage and a browsing and image editing interface similar to Adobe Lightroom.  You can upload images, edit them, their colors, tones, crop, fix exposure, red eye, white balance,sharpen, and do black and white conversions, but that’s not all.

Images can be distributed similar to Flickr, which means embedding images in websites and blogs and having them linked to you Photoshop Express account.  Naturally you can set up a gallery and show your images directly from Express.  The really cool thing is the images are not public until you make them so.  In Flickr everything is just up on your photostream.  Express also offers integration with Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa.

The Future with Photoshop Express?

Sweet Jesus, just imagine the future with me for a second…
You take a picture with your WiFi enabled camera, it uploads directly to Photoshop Express, with your WiFi laptop you do the editing and then distribute you digital media to blogs and website, all online, no computer program to load on a computer, it’s all online, in the air, across the radio waves.  The need for redundant backup harddrives at home is less needed and you can access and edit your photos anywhere with an internet connection.

...or whatever, brass tacks Photoshop Express is a pretty kickass – a cool photo editing and sharing platform, and it’s what we’ve been expecting for a while.  Program distribution over the net, and all you need is a license agreement with the provider.  Many are surprised Microsoft hasn’t already done this with Windows.

Here’s the future: No software, just onlineware, nolineware, and for now it’s freeware, but for how long?

You can sign up here:

Photoshop Express

And quick tutorials are here:

Photoshop Express Techniques