This past Monday, I had the opportunity to sing at a Rosh Hashanah service down at Heritage Park in Old Town San Diego, California. While setting up chairs in the second level of the Jewish temple at the park, I came across two of these fantastic old reed organs. You could tell they were worn down and old, but they still played fine. The lighting up there was fantastic due to the setting sun and a series of small circular stained-glass windows, so I took as many pictures as I could. In the post-processing stage, I realized that I could emphasize the level of deterioration in the organ’s finish by (once again) running the image through a single-file HDR plugin. The resulting image, though grainy, really brings out the age of this beautiful instrument. I only wish I had snooped around a little more and found a manufacture date on one of these organs.

If you’ve been following my recent posts, you know the drill by now. The image above (best viewed at a larger size) was post-processed using Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter X. The actual image is from a trip to Washington D.C. in April of this year. On the flight back from D.C. to San Diego, as we flew into the sunset, a friend of mine told me to take a picture of the clouds out of the window. I usually disregard shots taken out of airplane windows as mere snapshots, but this particular shot caught my eye. I’ve had the original shot in my Flickr photostream for awhile now, but I decided to re-process it with an abstract vision in mind. The “painted” version obviously has more vibrant color than the plain copy, but in reality, the actual colors out the window were closer to this new version than my old edit. It’s also worth noting that I took this photo with an old Pentax lens I got on eBay for ~$30. At the time, I couldn’t afford the Pentax-FA f1.4 50mm I have now, so I took the poor man’s route. I’ve since sold it back online, but there’s just something special about shooting with an old lens. I’m seriously considering buying an old m42 mount 50mm Industar lens to somewhat make up for the FED-2 I sold awhile back.

Sorry for the lack of updates earlier this week, I’ve been working on a personal project I hope to launch in a few days. Anyway, the image above is another attempt at creating a faux painting using simple photos. The main image used is one I actually took in May 2006 using an incredibly cheap 2mp Nikon point and shoot camera. It was taken in a small airplane flying over San Diego, California, and was one of the few images from that flight that actually turned out decently clear. Unfortunately, the noise in the image made it virtually unusable. The second photograph in the composite was used for the night sky, and was taken in Anza Borrego State Park. Both images were run through Corel Painter X separately, and were later combined in Photoshop. In addition, a second copy of the main image was processed in a pseudo-HDR plugin, which brought out the low lighting of the situation. Considering that the source file is just over 500kb, it’s amazing how post-processing can save an image.