Illustrator Revisited

I'm taking a ten-week adult learning class on picture framing and matting.  Most of my effort is with my photographs, but I thought that I might resurrect one of my Adobe Illustrator drawings from a few years back.

I took one of my favorite pysanky designs, the "piven," which is a stylized rooster.  This is it, in the front-right.

Going the extra mile, I touched up some of the rougher areas around the cock's comb and tail feathers.  The nicest effect that I tweaked was making the flower stems on the bottom look like they were passing through the scroll work of the "feet."  Previous attempts had the stems breaking at the junctures.  This left tiny gaps that you could see in the blown up image. This time, I copied portions of the scrolling and placed them in a layer over the flower stem.

When I mat this, I'm thinking of a couple of concentric rectangles.  Even the $2,000 mat cutters in class can't do oval cutting.  The inner quarter-inch mat would use the light green color from the picture, and the larger outer mat would use the reddish brick color.  Something about the way that this browser is rendering the artwork is making the brick color look like cherry-red.  I sure hope the final printed copy remains brick!

On the Bandwagon

A while back, there was a twitter meme that struck my fancy:  https://twitter.com/hashtag/trumpyourcat.

I have a cat that fits the profile well, so I had to contribute:

"Show me someone without an ego, and I'll show you a loser" --

  Donald "Cooter" Trump

Fleur du Jour

Meet the Asiatic dayflower (Commelina communis), which gets its name because the blooms last only one day. It is classified as a noxious weed in North America, but it is used as a medicinal herb in China, its native habitat. 

According to Chinese folk medicine, it has febrifugal, antipyretic, anti-inflammatory, and diuretic effects. It is also used for treating sore throats and tonsillitis.

In Japan the flowers were used to produce a pigment in many world-renowned woodcuts from the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Chinese Measels

An Ars Technica article. NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years, features a map, which shows the more than 600 sites around the continental U.S. that have been hit by Chinese hackers.

Can you spot WVU on this map?  I knew you could.

It looks like North Dakota is the only "safe" place in this country if you want to live off the grid.

My Pictures Stink

Earlier this year, I bought the book Your Photos Stink!: David Busch's Lessons in Elevating Your Photography from Awful to Awesome.  Sorry to say that I haven't gone all the way through this book, but I learned enough to be dangerous.

Here's a lesson that I applied:

This picture is of a Fuller's Teasel (Dipsacus fullonum) that I shot near Wally World.  Granted, it's nothing special, but to me it has a certain je ne sais quoi.  I even tried to go artsy-fartsy with it and render it in black & white.  It was then that I noted the "stink" factor:  the ant on the top-right of teasel is distracting.  I mean, it's a nice ant and all, but she wasn't meant to be the subject of my picture.  She had to go.

Here is the artsy-fartsy black & white teasel but without the ant:

You probably think I'm talking about putting lipstick on a pig, if you want to call my teasel a pig. Truth be told, I'm thinking that the color shot is more aesthetically pleasing.  But you have to admit that the shot is much better without the little photo bomber.

Using PhotoShop Stack Mode to minimize high ISO graininess

Meet the Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa), a species of milkweed native to eastern North America.  This seems to be a particularly good year for them.  I see prominent patches of their orange blooms off the side of the road as I drive around lately.

I took a series of focus-stack shots in the evening yesterday and ended up using 19 of them to make this picture.  Lately, I've been using the Auto ISO setting on my camera, so because of the time of day and the f/16 stop I was using, the Auto ISO ended up going all the way to 3200.

The first step in my process is to align all of the shots to each other.  Although I was using a tripod, a slight breeze was causing noticeable movement.  It wasn't so bad that the alignment process couldn't deal with it.

A bigger problem arose when I tried to do the Auto-blend step in PhotoShop to create the focus stack.  I had a very pesky photo bomber waltzing through my picture.  That's her, below, dancing from flower to flower.

Normally, like in the case of a fly, I'll just eliminate the shots that have the photo bomber.  In this case, however, the bomber was in quite a few of them.

I decided to invoke a technique that I have rarely used.  After I restacked the images, I used the PhotoShop command Layer --> Smart Objects --> Stack Mode --> Median, which analyzed the picture and removed anything that wasn't in all of the shots, i.e., the ant.

Try as I might, however, I couldn't find a way to Auto-blend the layers without bringing back the photo bomber.  As luck would have it, though, the f/16 aperture I had used already gave me a fairly decent depth of field.  While researching the other Stack Mode commands in the hope of finding something that would help me, I discovered that the Mean command was particularly good for removing graininess from high-ISO stacked images.  And it did it quite well.

If you look closely at the image with the photo bomber and compare it to the first image, you'll see the reduction in graininess that I'm talking about.  

Avian Flu

I'm hearing more and more recently about the avian flu.  The price of eggs is supposed to be going up because of this.  There was even a piece in today's Mountaineer ENews:   Safeguard your poultry flock amid avian flu concerns.  Wouldn't you know it, though?  The direct link to the safeguard article is broken!

But I'm going somewhere with this, and I had better get there...   another idea for my first million dollars:  flu masks for poultry, i..e., chickens and ducks.  This is going to be a test of my PhotoShop skills, because I doubt that I'm actually going to be able to get masks on a bird for real.

I did some marketing research on Google, looking to see if anyone else has come up with my brilliant idea.  So far, it's MY idea.    Visions of crowd funding are dancing in my head.

Oh, BTW, in my search, this was among the first hits:  a DIY mask: