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Warren Shea

Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Tutorials: Photography – Fine Tuning the photo manipulation process

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 at 12:11 am

Sorry for the looong post! I know I said I was going to work on warrenshea.com but instead, I spent tonight learning about photo manipulation. To be honest, I thought my Adobe Photoshop skillz were good. Not great, but pretty good. But no, there’s so much to learn and do with this program, it’s pretty ridiculous. Anyways, I spent some time Googling photo manipulation.
“How to get the background white”
“How to remove darkened corners”
“How to sharpen an image”

They all led me to some Photoshop skills. You can see the difference in each shot as the quality of the photo is increased. The order of changes for WHY I did them:

1. Adjusting the tone/color. I find that sometimes the tone can be off….doing either of these will make it a nicer one. A blue instead of a yellow, stuff like that.
2. Adjusting the levels to increase the lightness around a figure.
3. Lens Correction to increase the lightness around the corners of the shot.
4. Vibrance to increase some color contrast
5. High Pass filter, to increase sharpness. I LOVE this step, it looks fantastic after.

Click the image for a larger image
Wargreymon step-by-step process

Anyways, I learned that the 8 hours of photography last weekend were wasted. The lightsources I chose to lighten some things caused a dark shadow behind my figure. No amount of Lens Correction can fix it….sigh. The shots I took when I first got my light box are better to manipulate. Really though, I need more light for one. And two, a better camera. Doubt I’ll be able to get the latter any time soon. Maybe I can do something about the former…need to hit up a Henry’s.

ZOMG IT’S THE RAPTURE !

Monday, May 23rd, 2011 at 10:06 pm

Just some interesting shots from tonight…

Click the pics for a bigger version.

I really liked the contrast on the clouds in this shot.
Looked a lot better in real life tho…this camera didn’t do justice to it


This was another interesting shot…look at the contrast of clouds/fog, coming in from the right.
It’s like a natural disaster were looming just around to corner…
No photo manipulation here….just pretty interesting :)

10 month mystery……SOLVED!

Sunday, April 17th, 2011 at 3:38 pm

In one of my somewhat regular trips of Pacific Mall, I found myself awe-struck walking by a few pictures on the wall of a tattoo shop. I took some pictures of those pics in hopes of finding out where the pictures came from.

I couldn’t find out anything these pictures. Googling descriptive words was less than useless. A few weeks later, I went back to Pacific Mall but the pictures were moved to the inside of the tattoo shop…and I was too intimidated to go and ask them :P

I eventually made the first pic (above) my iPhone background and it’s been that picture for months now. I absolutely love it.

Months and months pass bringing us to now. I went to a computer store yesterday and noticed the 2nd picture (above) on the back of an iPhone case. I originally thought the pictures above were originals, made by the artist in the tattoo shop or something so seeing one of the pictures on an iPhone case was a bit shocking. I purchased the $4 iPhone case, despite that I wouldn’t use it, because I wanted to see if I could do any research on it. Maybe there was a signature on the case, maybe there was SOMETHING. There wasn’t.

But, I was able to google “Tattoo girl iphone case” into Google and come up with a whole mess of iPhone cases with this kind of art. I taxed my online search capabilities to their limit, searching for hours trying to find out more. Eventually, I came across a site (I’m talking about seeing 40 different “buy iphone case” sites before stumbling on to this one) that said “Mithra Tattoo iPhone Case“. Which then, led me to google Mithra and Mithra tattoo…which brought me to here:

Mithra Tattoo Canada

Finally, I had found what I was looking for. HQ Posters, a huge selection of stuff by the artist, “Little White“. I was pretty happy and proud with myself…Mission: Complete!

Anyways, I’m quite pleased with everything, finally finding the artist of a random picture I saw 10 months ago. I finally have a good quality, no reflection picture of the pic I wanted. I’m very tempted to buy some posters, only $17…but don’t really know where I could put them :( Maybe I’ll just buy them for later ;)

Omnimon & Predaking galleries

Sunday, April 3rd, 2011 at 12:51 am

I got my D-Arts Omnimon toy this month. As I played with it, I didn’t think there was much I could do with it. Sure, it came with 2 capes but the joints are awkward, you can’t position it like you might want. So I wasn’t too thrilled in doing a gallery for it but felt compelled to give Omnimon the same treatment as my Wargreymon post from earlier. Turns out…after taking some pictures, that you can do a LOT….I had a lot of fun taking the pictures, giving him poses. There was one problem, my photos were a bit too dark, they should have a white background, like most of my photos….oh well :( Anyways, here’s the Omnimon gallery, followed by my comparison chart between my D-Arts toy and an old Omnimon toy. That is my Wargreymon comparison chart (again). And below that are my Predaking shots.

Click on the images for a larger one
Omnimon Comparison chart

Wargreymon Comparison chart

The Generation 1 Predaking reissue is huge so there really isn’t much you can do with it…I only have 8 shots and most aren’t dynamic at all. For a $200 toy, I was hoping my gallery would be epic…but alas, it’s just too clunky to take good shots.

On another note, it was great to pull out my photography stuff, after 4 months (which is pretty long). With taking photographs, manipulating them, posting about them (all to the sounds of ReBoot Season 3!), I’ve been doing this for about 6 hours now. It’s so time consuming…

Tomorrow: Zelda + Web Development. That’s my plan :) Nice to do stuff just for me…that was the plan of this weekend and so far, I’m fulfilling it…

Just got a Mario Shirt…

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 11:29 pm

…so I decided to do this.


All of my mario/nintendo mints…
Wait, the Yoshi is a toy….

http://www.toywiz.com/mariocandy.html tells me there’s a star mint and a blue mushroom i’m missing….and a wii controller…