... and the surprisingly positive reaction they received!
Why was I surprised by the reaction these photos received? Well, pull up a chair, sip on a cuppa, and let me tell you a tale of these two edits.
For awhile now, I have had a gallery in my Portfolio set aside just for one particular fun type of editing filter - Colored Foil. This is a filter that is part of my editing software (I don't use Photoshop - I use Corel PSP), and I have had great fun using this filter for various photos.
I love the colorful and whimsical effect produced when it all comes together just right.
However, it is a filter that is not easy to control or tweak, so it very rarely all comes together to achieve the "look" I really like.
Of the hundreds of photos I have attempted to tweak with Colored Foil, only a handful have really turned out the way I want... and you can see most of those in the Colored Foil Gallery here on my website.
I put them on my website just to show the creative and colorful side of my love for photography. I never really expected anyone to share my adoration for this quirky colorful look. In fact, when I first made the page for the Color Foil photos, I did not include it in the menu so it wouldn't be one of the main pages someone might click on. I wasn't sure anyone would take these photos seriously.
So imagine my surprise when I got a call from a friend whose daughters and their families would all be in town at the same time. She wanted an informal family portrait done. I almost dropped the phone when she said "and I want one done like the colorized photos on your website." I had to ask her to repeat it, and then I had to clarify that she was talking about the Colored Foil filtered photos.
My friend had in mind the location for her "Fun Family Portrait" (the backyard play gym of a mutual friend), and she knew she wanted all the family spread out on various parts of the play gym. She wanted "colorful and fun," and she wanted faces that could be seen but it was okay if the faces weren't necessarily completely recognizable.
Well, it turns out that one of the unpredictable parts of this Colored Foil filter is how people's faces will turn out. In a group setting, I can have some faces completely unaltered and some faces completely turned into blobs that don't even look human. Another of the unpredictable parts of the Colored Foil filter is what the colors will do. And trying to get both of these aspects to do what you want them to do at the same time is pretty much impossible... like herding cats, or even herding one cat!
I warned her about the difficulties involved and told her I could give her no guarantees about how it would turn out or if it would turn out at all.
Having given my "disclaimer," and after the photo shoot was complete and most of the "regular" portrait photos had been organized and edited, I sat down at my computer ready to tackle the challenge of turning one of the play gym photos into a Colored Foil masterpiece, or at least one that would be close to what she wanted. This image below is the one I started with.
Sure enough, just as I feared, when I tweaked the "detail" function of the filter to get the faces the way I wanted, the colors all did strange and not-so-pleasant things, and when I tweaked the "blur" function of the filter, the face outlines and details did not match up with the colors I wanted.
Sometimes, some of the faces would be just right and others would be way off, and sometimes the colors in part of the photo would be fantastic, but other spots would be completely void of any color and were just various shades of gray (you can see that I left some of those voids in the final photo, but they are not as noticeable and distracting as they were before).
I decided that if this really was going to work (and I was determined that it would work), then I would have to resort to surgery - specifically head surgery. After a few false starts, I got pretty good at creating several different stages of "head detail and color" for each person, and then transplanting one head (and other body parts if needed) from one version to the waiting body of the "final" version that had the right color combinations I had been looking to achieve. (FYI - photo editing head transplants is also easier than herding cats!)
The end result was one that I was quite pleased with, and the fact that I was able to overcome the difficulties of working with this filter gives me hope that I will be able to enjoy even more Colored Foil creations in my photography future!
The second photo that received a positive reaction I was not quite expecting was one of my digitized prints from old family photos of my mom's side of the family, some dating back over 100 years ago.
A few years ago, I met with my mother and her siblings. They were going through boxes of old photos from their parents and grandparents. I set up my camera on a small table next to where they were working. They would bring me photos, and I would photograph them on a simple white background. Later I edited the photos for perspective and color correction and gave a copy of all the digitized photos to each of them.
Recently, one side of my mother's family was having the usual reunion held every other year. Part of the reunion always includes a fun auction to pay for the costs of the reunion. Whoever wants to donate an item or two for the auction is welcome. Then we all bid against each other.
This year I thought that the formal family portrait of my great grandparents (and my grandfather and his eight siblings) would make a great auction item. I pulled up the photo and did much more detailed editing than I had done before. I added the name of the family with a border, printed it as an 8x10, and displayed it in a nice table-top frame.
Here is the photo that I took of the photo - straight out of my camera before anything else was done to it. I did not have a copy board or any special lighting set up when I took this photo, so I was very pleased that it turned out the way it did after editing and retouching.
Since the reunion includes many of the children and grandchildren (my mother's cousins and my second cousins) of the siblings in this photo, I knew the photo would be a hit.
But it is also a common photo - many family members have old printed copies of this particular photo, some in decent condition and others not so much.
Apparently not many people have a retouched and framed version of this photo, because the reaction it received was much more than I expected.
I had just pulled the photo from the carry bag to place on the auction table with all the other auction items.
It didn't make it to the table. Immediately it was taken from my hands, and then the "oohs" and "ahhhs" started up as the photo was passed hand to hand among the cousins, many gathering around it to say "this was my father... that was so-and-so's mother... she was the oldest... no, he was not the baby" etc.
I never did get close to that photo again. Once it finally made it back to the auction table (now full of fingerprints on the frame glass), it was only because it was time for us to go next door to dinner before the auction.
It would have been enough to have experienced that overwhelmingly positive reaction to my simple framed 8x10 photo offering, but the fact that my photo was kept until last in the auction as the "icing on the cake" and the fact that in the end it brought in a hightest bid of over $100 really blew me away! What an encouragement!
Now the pressure's on for the NEXT reunion! At least I have two years to sort out what item I can take....but I have a feeling nothing will match this experience.