Shards and Phractures

There's one Photoshop trick that's always fascinated me. I've always been intrigued by the idea of changing a photo into a drawing. I've seen at least a hundred tutorials on the 'net for doing this, but they never seemed to do exactly what I wanted. They always looked more like a bad watercolor drawing. I had a really hard time finding exactly the effect I wanted. But I think I've finally hit on the technique I was looking for. It was deceptively--and surprisingly--easy, and I've spent the last several days trying out various pictures and effects with it. It helps to start with a clear, sharp picture, with good contrast. In the finished drawing, the sharp lines come in clear and crisp, just like they should. But even when the original shot isn't so sharp, the end result can still be fun and interesting. Shots of people and animals are the hardest to make work. Since a flash can wipe out details, the drawings that come out often show people missing ...

That's right, your Shards and Phractures author, photographer, and all around geek is moving to a whole new place...all the way from Phoenix to Nebraska, believe it or not. ...and I've got to admit, it's a whole new world, photographically speaking. I mean, there's this green stuff all over the place, and the various plants don't bite if you get too close to them like they do in Arizona... And, about every other day, this strange and mysterious thing happens...WATER actually falls from the sky! I've heard of this occurring, but didn't really believe it was possible. In Arizona, there's nothing much to look at on the ground, and if you want something interesting, you need to silhouette it against a cool sunset. Here in Nebraska, though, you can find some interesting stuff to shoot. The local animals are a little more tame, too. ...this guy actually posed for me for a few shots. Most of the squirrels don't stand still long enough to really get a decen...

"...to boldly go where no one has gone before..." Sure, it's a tagline from Star Trek, but it applies to photography also. It's one of the reasons for photography, I think...to see things no one else can see. To really stop, and really LOOK, and get down on your hands and knees and see things you never knew about before. And, more importantly, to try to record those things after you've seen them. That's why I'm into close-up photography, or "Macro" photography. Did you know bees wear fur? Did you know beetles have spikes on their collars, like a natual built-in punk rocker fashion design? You can't make out a bug's fashion sense from five or six feet in the air...you have to climb down to his level, look him in the eye, ask him nicely to hold still...and hope he's in an agreeable mood... I enjoy shooting bugs and flowers and water droplets and anything else that will sit still long enough for me to zo...

Lightning is one of the most frustrating subjects in photography. Think about it. You can't know where lightning is going to strike next. And you can't point your camera at the sky and push the button as soon as you see the flash; by the time the nerve signal gets from your brain to your finger, the bolt is gone, and there's nothing left to see in the picture except a lot of dark. So the only way to take a lightning picture is to point your camera where you think the lightning is going to strike, and leave the shutter hanging wide open for as long as you can, and cross your fingers that the "Lightning Gods" will be kind to you with this storm. You take black picture after black picture, while trying to keep your equipment dry, while trying to keep from becoming a target for the lightning yourself. And all the while, lightning strikes again and again--off to the side, where the camera isn't pointed...up in the clouds, where you can't see it...and directly i...

You can learn a lot just by watching...professional wrestling. Okay, now that I've driven away half my reader base, never to return...and half the rest are laughing hysterically at my social blunder and obvious lack of intelligence...allow me to illuminate. Professional wrestling is a television show pretending to be sports; think "soap opera for guys." Wrestlers are actors and stuntmen, putting on a match where they try to appear to be beating the snot out of each other--hopefully, without actually beating the snot out of each other, because there's always another show to do the next night. The wrestlers know who is supposed to "win" the match, but the actual wrestling is basically made up on the spot between the wrestlers. Most wrestling plotlines involve the "Face" (good guy) opposing the "Heel" (bad guy). Faces wrestle by the rules, while heels cheat. More importantly, faces try to get the crowd to cheer for them, while heels try to g...

...okay, so maybe "started it all" is a bit of an overstatement...let me explain... I grew up with photography. My father had his old Minolta or Canon out often, and I still have boxes and boxes of slides of my brothers and I growing up and all of the places we lived travelling with the military. I actually remember taking a picture for him from the top of a pagoda at Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan, because I could fit into the gap he wanted the picture taken from and he couldn't. I must have been six or seven years old at the time. I bought my first camera, a Minolta X-500, with my first paycheck after I finished high school, and I set out to shoot as many pictures with it as I could. That camera even went with me to Air Force Basic Training, and I still use it today, when I get the urge to shoot film instead of digital. But, growing up, no one ever told me about all the other stuff photographers are supposed to know about, like composition, and lighting, and exposure...and it se...

Now, I'm an understanding and patient guy. And I've been a Yahoo email fan for years. Check the profile (data_devil) and you'll see that I've had my email address for nearly eight years. I don't know of any of my friends who have managed to keep a Yahoo address alive that long, before it became deluged with spam and totally unuseable. I was there when Yahoo barely gave 4mb of storage, not the amazingly large numbers you get now. I was there when Yahoo bought up Egroups and merged them into the Yahoo network. I've always reccomended Yahoo email to friends who were new to the 'net and needed someplace to check their email. I'm having a really hard time doing that anymore. My Yahoo account is screwed up somehow. On my computer at home, the Yahoo screen locks up right after it puts the logo in the top left. Sometimes a Refresh will get it going, other times I just have to close the browser and start over. It happens on the main Inbox screen and at every emai...