Magnolia Cemetery at Sunset

Sunday, I had to go in and do some work at The Greenville Advocate. I was leaving about 6:15 p.m. and saw some beautiful cloud formations. I decided to shoot some silhouettes of the grave markers in Magnolia Cemetery. The oldest part of the cemetery is tucked away in a wooded area, so the opportunity to shoot a silhouette is rare. There are only a couple of graves in a clearing overlooking the remainder of the cemetery that are clear of the treeline.

The cemetery is one of my favorite places to shoot in Greenville. The older section of the cemetery dates back to the Civil War era, possibly earlier. There was one particular grave marker that I'd wanted to shoot for a while. I was just waiting for a good sunset.

I shot around the cemetery while I waited for the sun to begin setting. When the sun started getting close to the top of the tree line, I set up my tripod and waited. After about 20 minutes, I started shooting. This shot was near the end of a sequence of about 40 shots spaced about 30 seconds apart.

The image is a tone-mapped RAW file. I had to boost the saturation a little more than normal because Picasa tends to flatten out images when they're uploaded to blogger.

Commerce Street, Greenville

As I was leaving work last Monday I noticed a heavy thunder could was moving in over Commerce Street in Downtown Greenville. I managed to shoot off six or seven sets of bracketed exposures (-2/0/+2 Stops) and then used FDR Tools to merge everything into a HDR image.

That didn't work too well. The wind was blowing really bad and I got a lot of ghosting in the clouds and bushes on the left side of the frame. In the end, I ended up tone-mapping the middle exposure in one of the brackets to expose the buildings and bushes. I used the under exposed frame and tone-mapped the sky.

After that, I created a mask around the buildings and shrubs and erased the sky from the exposure with the building and shrubs. That allowed the sky on the layer below to show through.

After that I cleaned up some dust spots and removed a traffic light that was sticking up out of the middle of the bushes. It was a really distracting element because it went right through the middle of the dark cloud.

Overall, it took about three hours to finish the post processing on the merged photograph.

(Note: HDR imaging, DRI imaging and Tone Mapping require RAW image format. You can't technically create a HDR, DRI or tone-mapped image from a JPEG or any other file type. Only RAW format keeps all of the luminosity data when the image was taken. Other file types have algorithms that determine how much of the captured data is saved in order to compress the file before saving.)

New Retro Style Cartoons

I picked up a copy of Christopher Hart's Cartoon Cool: How to Draw New Retro-Style Cartoons a couple of weeks ago. The style is based on cartoons from the 1950s and 190s, but has a more modern flair.

If you've seen any of the Erin Esurance commercials, you'll recognize the style. But, the style really reminds me of Betty Boop. The Betty Boop films ran from 1932-1932 and were produced my Max Fleischer and released by Paramount Pictures.

Betty was an overtly sexy character for three years, but restrictions placed on the motion picture industry regarding sexuality caused Betty Boop to be toned down.

However, she was the first and most famous animated sex symbol and still remains popular today.

I really like this style because it's fun to draw. But also because one of the mainstays of this style is that it is centered around a family or group of people that are self-centered, irreverent and dysfunctional. In that way it reminds me a lot of South Park.

All that aside, I'm still learning to draw the style. I've been following along with the examples and practicing. The scan from my sketchbook is some of the practice. I'm beginning to understand how this style is drawn. I'm planning to start developing my own characters soon for a comic strip entitled "Life as a Wallbanger." It's about a dysfunctional family "somewhere in America."