Steve Loos Photography

old fortress

Posted by steve loos (hollister, United States) on 20 December 2011 in Art & Design.

As a pilot and Air Force Medic (many years ago) I enjoy all things aviation. A friend of mine is the director of the Castle Air Force Museum near Merced California. This all volunteer group works hard to preserve the history of the crews and aircraft that flew out of this base, and has an impressive collection of aircraft on display.

I volunteer my time to photograph these beautiful old aircraft, and donate the photographs to the museum (sweet deal for me as I get to be close and photograph these old aircraft.) Recently I had the outdoor area of the museum almost to myself, and shot a number of these planes in the beautiful soft light of the setting sun. After I finished processing the photographs I wanted to create an artistic rendering of one of the photographs to use as cover art for this group of photographs. I formed an idea in my mind to process one of the images to look like an old, worn, wrinkled photograph.

I am pretty darn good at Photoshop, but have never spent any time learning how to apply artistic or “painterly” effects to a photograph. I wandered through Aminus3 and Flickr, and did some Google searches on the techniques. I use Nik plug-ins and found several that converted the image to an “old” style look. To get the wrinkled look I needed to add a texture layer to the image; a texture layer is added behind the image and blended so the “texture” features show through the main photograph. Photoshop has texture layer gallery but none of them gave me the look I wanted. I found a few texture images on line and downloaded a few to give them a try.

The image was shot with a full frame D700 and a Nikon 16mm fisheye lens held very close to the ground. The fisheye lens will create a circular, curved shape to the image but the center line in the frame will remain straight. For example when shooting a wide landscape if the horizon is held level and in the center of the frame the horizon will remain straight. In images such as this where the entire wing can be seen I try and keep the wings straight by keeping the wings level and in center frame. In post process I use a plug-in by Image Trends called Fisheye-Hemi. This straightens the curved vertical lines and allows a more natural looking image than can be obtained using the lens correction features of Photoshop. This image was then given a wide 2:1 crop.

After I was done processing the color image (these can all be seen at the link below) I added the texture layer and changed the blending to soft light. I used Nik Color Efex to change the color photograph layer to “old photograph”, and Silver Efex to increase the contrast of the texture layer. I played with the opacity of the texture layer and landed around 65% for this effect.

This is my first try at "painting" with Photoshop and I was rather pleased as the end result matched what I had in mind when starting this project.

What do you think?

http://steveloosphotography.com/castlephotos (right click link, open in new window)

I live and work in California’s central coast. Please take a moment to visit my photography website:

http://steveloosphotography.com/