Big Format Picture

1. Techno-Town (24x36)

2. 6.3.11 @ 8.45PM Rexburg, Idaho
3. Canon Powershot SX120IS, Aperture Priority, f/4.3, Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec

4. Adjustment layer > Filter: Cutout (@ 7,1,2) > Poster Edges (2,1,6) > reduced opacity and fill on the left chimney and middle building to about 75% > sharpened these parts to define bricks and other details > Size of image and then crop

5. After sorting through the huge stack of images that I have taken this semester, I kept coming back to this one. I realize that it is a little out of the norm, but I loved this picture and felt that it would be something that I would not mind in my abode. I like that it is a little more stylized than most, but I like it.

As for my photographic technique... I was strolling around Rexburg on my way back into town when in the distance, I saw something that was not quite what I thought of Rexburg as. So I pulled out my camera and quickly made sure that I was on decent settings and then I zoomed... quite a bit (55.9mm). I tried to capture the essence of what I saw. I figured that while the picture itself did not really cause any heads to turn, this could be a picture that I could make into something.

When I took it into Photoshop, I saw it in my mind's eye. I kind of knew what I wanted, but I was willing to try some different stuff. I wanted to make it look more like paint, but with the cutout filter by itself, it lost tons of the detail that I appreciated about the original picture. However, I knew what I was looking for, so I went back to the poster edges and gave it back just that bit of detail that I wanted. Some still looked a little more interesting than I had anticipated, so I reduced the opacity there, and now you see the image before you that I created. 

Edit: Fine Art Template

Taylor | 6.6.11 @ 3.51 | Rexburg (BYU-I campus) | f/8 | Shutter Speed: 1/500 | Canon Powershot SX120 IS | ISO 200 | Focal Length: 8.2mm | no flash

I was walking with the Kimball in mind, but I saw these gorgeous clouds behind the Taylor building. Thankfully, I had my camera, so I started taking pictures. When I saw this one, I was curious to see what I could do with it in my shiny new HDR program. I took it in and boosted the contrast majorly. Then I took any blue out of the sky to make the clouds seem that much more ominous. As far as putting it into the Fine Art Template, I had a few good chuckles with this, but I finally went with basically exactly how the book says to do it. I went with a black background because I think that it sets off my image beautifully.

Techno-Town | 6.3.11 @ 8.45pm | Rexburg, ID | f/4.3 | Shutter Speed: 1/320 | Canon Powershot SX120IS | ISO 200 | Focal Length: 55.9mm | no flash

Can I begin by telling you how much I LOVE this image? I was strolling around Rexburg looking for things to take pictures of when I caught sight of this in the distance. It was so amazingly awesome that I took a picture, although I was not sure if I liked how the picture came out initially. But then I saw it with filters in mind... one smart object conversion and then cut out and poster edges filters later, I had an image that I considered drooling over. I had to create another template to capture more of the length of the image... but that was fine with me. I loved it so very much... Then I dropped it into my newly made template and smiled a whole lot.