Creating with Photoshop 2

Violet Tendencies

    Way back in 2015 I posted Creating with Photoshop on this blog. I wanted to share some of my work and my creative process. Since my photoshop chops have improved and I'm able to go a lot deeper with some of my work I thought I'd do an update and show some recent work. One thing I've realized is that when I'm doing this work, when I'm lost in the world of Photoshop, I feel that I am truly in the moment. 

Bowling in Ithaca

    

Cross Bay Lanes in Howard Beach, NY
(photo by Bill Aiello)

    I never excelled at organized sports as a kid. The one and only year I played in little league baseball I was terrible. I reached base just one time. I don’t think it was even a hit, I think I reached first base due to a fielding error. My younger brother was the athlete in the family. He excelled in baseball, football and basketball. He won all kinds of accolades and trophies. What I really did most of the time during those preteen and early teen years was watch a lot of television. When I was 15 my best friend Larry suggested we should join the bowling league. For some reason I agreed to this so we joined the Starrett City Youth Association bowling team.

Moving Music: "Blue Sky"

    

The Allman Brothers: (L to R) Jaimoe, Duane Allman, Greg Allman, 
Dicky Betts, Berry Oakley and Butch Trucks
(photo by Jim Marshall)

     There are a good number of songs that have affected me in profound ways throughout my life. In the next couple of months I'd like to feature some of them here. This won’t be a song analysis post and it definitely won’t be any of those “Why you should like this” type of posts either. I’ve always found them to be a bit obnoxious. Obviously, like many art forms, music is subjective. There can be many reasons why you love a song or why it speaks to you in a certain way. I want my focus to be on how these songs have transcended from something much more than a great pieces of music to something that goes deeper into my being. I won’t particularly dwell on great lyrics or fabulous musicianship of these songs, though certainly these things are some of the qualities that have endeared the song to me. It’s basically how, for whatever reasons, these songs have elicited a feeling in me that is much more than the sum of its parts. I’m also not going to try to convince you that you too should like any song I explore. I understand if you think the song is just okay or you don’t like the singer’s voice, or maybe it's too country or too disco or too whatever for your liking. I get it. It's a very personal experience. Maybe you will appreciate it or maybe you'll think about songs in your own life that have moved you in an incredible way. The first song I'd like to feature is “Blue Sky” by The Allman Brothers Band.

Vegas, Baby

Is this sign a sign?

    Well that title may be a little misleading. It’s not really about Las Vegas, it’s more about the iconic “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. And that’s really only the object of yet another one of my synchronistic-divine intervention moments. You can read about the previous two examples here and here. This time we're going to Vegas, baby.
    I was working on a photo in Photoshop. Basically I was experimenting with a photo I had taken back in November 2020. That particular shoot involved a 1960’s theme and the model was styled like a Vegas showgirl; I was doing a reproduction of a Robert McGinnis illustration that was from that era. So, like a lot of the times when I experiment in Photoshop, I picked a photo with the goal of just making something cool and interesting. Usually I’m just making something up as I go along. Since it was a 60’s shoot, I thought about including graphics of that era: mid-century graphics, atomic age graphics, etc. I worked on it for a few days and really liked how it looked. I had funky starbursts and atom icons, with warm, beautiful colors and nice geometrical shapes. Then I thought maybe I’d include the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign and allude to the fact that model would be performing there. I found the sign quite easily in a google search and it was a png file that already had the photo on a white background; real easy to remove and place in my project. I worked on it for about an hour but ultimately decided it didn’t work and scrapped that idea. Later on the same night I finished watching season 3 of The Sinner that was just released on Netflix (originally aired on USA Network).

Another Coincidence?

It's a twister, It's a twister
(Image obtained from www.weather.com)

    Recently I posted a article about being amazed and seeing the same camera shot in a tv show and movie I had happened to watch back to back. Well just yesterday I came across a similar situation, this time involving StarTalk and the movie Places in the Heart.

    StarTalk is a podcast hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are different segments, including live town halls with guests(though not recently due to covid) and others that have a specific theme. I subscribe to the channel on youtube, and if I may put in a plug for it, it’s a channel I think you should subscribe to as well. It’s very educational of course but also very entertaining. Neil gets very excited talking about science. The particular show I was watching is called Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains and is co-hosted by comedian Chuck Nice, who does a good job of throwing down the humor. The segment was called Force vs Pressure. In one part he talks about how when there is a tornado, the air around it has very low pressure and if it descends near a house, the pressure inside the house will be greater than outside. There is no equilibrium between the air inside and outside. The result is there will be enough force to blow out the walls of the house, “turning it into matchsticks” as Chuck had said. I did not know this. I thought tornadoes just rip roofs off, spin cows in the air and send houses to OZ. I guess they do some of those things but I never thought that it could explode a house. This brings us to Places in the Heart.

Photo Walking

5 Spot restaurant along the staircase trail

    Recently I came across a website that has a list of 30 staircase trails throughout the city of Seattle and thought these would be perfect for photo walking. I’ve been doing photo walks since 2003, when I purchased my first camera. It's been something I’ve been doing a lot more this past year during this the Covid epidemic, especially in the last couple of months.   

    Seattle is composed of a series of hills and on those hills are more hills, slopes and ridges. Some of the steepest roads in Seattle: Denny Way, Dravus and Queen Anne Ave can be accessed by walking on the sidewalk. There are, however, many areas in Seattle where a sidewalk wouldn’t work. So Seattle built close to 500 staircases to access the streets below and above wherever you may be on any particular hill, some dating back to 1905. With these 30 staircase trails you can go in either direction, however the list does tell you how many up and down steps there are and favors the direction with more up steps than down. I’ve always loved walking and it's great exercise, especially if they involve lots of stairs to climb so it wasn't a problem to see the hikes were 4 to 5 miles, so I chose the direction with more steps up. I'm all for the challenge.  I chose the first trail on the list called “Queen Anne” simply because I could pick up the trail a half a block from my front door. I was familiar with most of the areas on this staircase climb, though I certainly hadn’t been on all the staircase before. Some of them are quite remarkable and beautiful such as Wilcox Wall, The Galer Crown and The Comstock Grand Dame.