Photoshop Grunge

I love photos from Burning Man (they can make for extraordinary raw material in grunge compositions), and one of the best photographers online documenting the annual event is Philip Steele at the #1 Google-ranked photo site featuring photos from Burning Man: BurnMonkey.com.

He just posted a great tutorial on how to use blending modes in quickly grunging-up a shot. What I like most about his tutorial is the way he weaves in brief asides explaining WHY he tweaks the grunge effects used in the image the way he does. His comments reveal that he is truly a photographer using Photoshop while always continuing to think like a photographer (as opposed to a Photoshop-addict caught up in the effect itself, without giving thought to the composition as a whole).

Take a few minutes to go through his tutorial at the link below. You have to opt-in to get access to it, but I’ve opted in myself and he’s not sending out a bunch of email or anything like that. So no worries there. This is definitely worth checking out:

http://photoshopgrunge.com/burnmonkey

When an opportunity comes up to get some cool photos, you just have to grab ‘em. I had a chance to sit in at a quad rugby event (aka “Murderball”), where quadriplegics play rugby in battle-armored wheelchairs. It’s amazing to watch. And these guys are really, really cool. Cool to begin with, and cool in what they’re doing … but also really cool to photograph.

I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday, and as always, I swung through the photography / Photoshop section, and, as always, I came away unsatisfied. I don’t know if it’s that there are no great photo-artists interested in writing books, or if it’s that the publishers assume the public won’t be interested in anything beyond the trivial and overdone and boring.

One thing is certain: if you already know how to fix red-eye and correct a color cast, there’s nothing there worth reading.

There were two books from some years back that pass nearest what I wish there were more of on the market. One was The Art of Photoshop, by Daniel Giordan, and the other was New Masters of Photoshop, published by Friends of Ed (and good luck getting a copy!).

Even in those two books (and I can dimly recall a couple of others with some passing merit), even in those the work itself was of mixed quality and the instruction overblown in some areas while wholly lacking in others.

What we need is a book written with the serious Photoshop artist in mind, where we can see great art unfold before us, and learn something of the creative process itself.

The nearest work I’ve seen presented on this scale is Vincent Versace’s exemplary Welcome to Oz. I’ve written a set of notes on his techniques, but while I am impressed with his professionalism and creative process, at the end of the day his purpose to create something that looks gorgeous but leaves you wondering if Photoshop even came into it. (It did, in a big way, but his intention is to make you wonder if it was Photoshop or brilliant camera work alone.) Since my interests are more on the side of brazen Photoshop work, his book only partly satisfies.

My hope is that through some of the interviews I conduct for this site, and some of the tutorials I am able to assemble, that I will perhaps be able to create a substitute, here online, for the book that I keep wishing I would find every time I enter the photography aisle at the bookstore.

This is going to be extremely exciting, but after drafting out my plans for what I think this site could become, I can see already that it’s going to require a heck of a lot of work.  Since it’s really only a hobby for me just yet, it sort of has to take a backseat to my other projects.  But it should still be a lot of fun (when I can fit it in).

This is the first posting on my brand new site.  Visit again soon.  There is going to be a lot of great material here.

(Photo from www.burnmonkey.com. Used by permission. Grunged to my liking.)