More time lapse

I went back to the same beach two days in a row and shot some more time lapse. This time I set the interval to 6 seconds and compiled at 24 frames per second. It came out a little smoother. I think my next one will be 5 seconds at 30 frames a second but it will take more photos to get the same amount of video length. Each of these time lapse compress about 50 minutes into 17 seconds. It was cold as, well, it was cold. This one has some cool effects with layers of clouds moving in different directions. I didn't see it when I was shooting it but looks cool in time lapse.

Sunrise and optomism

In my younger days I was a milkman. Yes, glass bottles delivered before dawn. I saw many, many, sunrises and feel there is something special about them more so than a sunset. First off, everyone usually sees the sunsets but few see the sunrises. Instead of light fading to dark, darkness gives way to light which, to me, brings an optomism with the start of the new day that just isn't there with sunsets. Having just gotten my camera the day before I was treated to one of mother natures fireworks shows the very next morning. I of course, had my camera with me. I just wish I had a better understanding of the controls. I was driving into the east and decided to jump off the highway before I completely lost the lightshow going on as I drove. If you can believe it, 10 minutes before this it was 10 times more spectacular with more vivid pinks and blues. It looked like alternating ribbons of illuminated cotton candy accross the sky. I was lucky enough to snap this.

I started travelling to work with my point and shoot cheapo camera over a year ago, but whenever I saw a sky like this, it would automatically adjust the exposure and bleach out any kind of meaningful effect. I just gave up trying to capture the image. Given my fascination with clouds and art I hope to capture more like this and eventually try to paint it on a canvas. I doubt I could ever duplicate this kind of shear beauty, but it will be fun to try. 

I've been a little busy

It never seems to fail. I went from having too much time on my hands from an unexpected layoff to working full time with many hours of overtime for the past 9 months. Believe me, I am not complaining. It doesn't however, provide time for the things I like to do to feed the creative person inside of me who is feeling a little neglected lately. Given that I work in the paradise that is the south fork of Long Island and am surrounded by nature all day, I figured I would treat myself to a new fangled digital SLR camera. I have wanted one for years and thought it would help with my artwork. I also used to dabble in photography and astrophotography back in the 80's. What I didn't realize was you can do time lapse photography with these cameras very easily. I wanted to catch the sunrise this morning given it was the end of the moons cycle and there was just a slither of moon before sunrise. So at O dark thirty in the morning, off to the beach I went. This image is what it looked like when I got there.

You can see a slither of the moon in the right side of the sky. I then set up the intervalometer to take an image every 12 seconds. I got 434 usable images in succession and at 30 frames a second it yielded 16 seconds of video. Unfortunately, as the sun rose so did the cloud cover but it was still pretty cool. Here is my first attempt. I'm sure there will be more.

It all started with the want of a Mahl stick

 I have been using a shaky old table top easel. As if that wasn't bad enough it wasn't too stable and prone to tip over if you weren't careful. I eventually clamped it to the old shop table I was using. In place of a Mahl stick I would stand a can of spray paint in front of the canvas and rest my arm on that. I figured what was the point of getting a Mahl stick of the easel couldn't support it. I looked at easels online and didn't like what I saw for the money. I decided to build my own. It had to be collapsible, mobile, fit through a standard 28 inch interior doorway, fully adjustable and provide support the full way across the top canvass holder. Most easels just give you a short cross bar and it provides little support on the outer upper corners. I also wanted some kind of Mahl capability and it had to be built to last and solid as a rock. This is what I came up with. 2-5/16" carriage bolts clamp the lower support. For the top, I countersunk a tee nut also 5/16" and made a plug out of teak (also gotten for free) to prevent marring the face of the center support. This applies pressure to a double French cleat similar to what is used to hang wall cabinets. The supports that hold the assembly upright are 1/4" carriage bolts. It will hold a canvass about 65 inches tall. I figure If I have to, I could always make swing out outriggers for more stability if the need arises. My concern was that I wanted it to hold smaller canvases securely.

The best part is this was all made with "rescued" and recycled mahogany and sapelle wood that was all free. If you look close at the feet, you can see it was a mahogany stair tread rejected by the millwork company. The majority of the rest of it was recycled mahogany flooring I got from a friend renovating his house. I even had the wheels from a showroom renovation where I worked a couple of years ago. Total cost was about $35.00 for hardware and glue.

This wood is getting harder and harder to come by and more expensive. It takes such a long time to grow one of these trees it would be a crime to let it go to waste. Just a little wood factoid, it takes about 300 years to grow an ebony tree 1 foot in diameter. Only God can make a tree but it takes the ignorance of man to chop it up and put it in a dumpster.

 

The eyes have it

This is about the closest I can get it for now. I know the eye on the viewers left needs to come up a little and the one on the right needs to get rounded out just a tad. I am not going to make any more changes until I fix the eyebrows. The one on the left is too high to the inside and making it look too pouty. I have yet to fix the nose and mouth. The nose is too long, wide and needs to shift left as does the mouth. Then I can fix the shadowing, color and blending. For my first portrait attempt I am just glad it doesn't have that "just zapped with a cattle prod" look. Hopefully the 2nd face will go faster. Like my my first Karate instructor used to say "the first thousand are the hardest".

My new invention

I call it "stick and rubber band" LOL. Here's a good shot of my "studio" too. It's a table in the garage with a light over it, but there's room for a cup of coffee.

 I have been going somewhat crazy trying to get the eyes just right. I fixed the right eye (viewers left) and am happy with it but the other one was so far off I just took it off with a cotton swab down to the stained canvas.

Horizontal placement is easy with the proportional divider but the vertical placement is a different story. I first used the SWAG method (scientific wild ass guess) of placing the height of the eye pupil with a wash of burnt umber thinned with odorless mineral spirits. I was holding the paint brush and comparing the angle but I just wasn't sure. I felt like I kept losing the proper angle. This is what I did. I took a grease pencil and marked the plane of the eyes on the laminated reference photo. Then I took my camera tripod and secured a stiff straight stick to the pad with a rubber band. Placed the photo and canvas next to each other and set the angle to the line on the reference photo and compared it to the canvas by changing my eye level, not the tripod. I was very close but not perfect. All in all it worked good and it was cheap enough.

Thinking back, I wasn't sure why but the nose always looked too short even though according to the grid it was in the right spot. I know it's too wide but that's another issue (I have plenty of those). The answer was the eyes were just a little too low. It also resulted in a slightly bigger forehead below the hair line. I thought the hair was off but I was wrong. This marks a first for me. I thought I was wrong once before, but I was mistaken! When I was a mechanic I used to say "there's no substitute for experience". This holds true for most things. It's mistakes like this that you (hopefully) learn from and learn to avoid in the future. Some days you learn more than others if you know what I mean. These last two days I learned a boatload. The biggest problems were my grid and reference photo. The grid wasn't even. As the grease pencil point dulled it threw off the spacing. Not much, just enough to give me grief. I switched reference photos for detail around the eyes. The one I have been using is better for color but too dark to see the detail needed to shape the upper lids. After redoing the eyes (yes both, again) here is where I'm at.

Here is a transparent overlay on the painting. The reference is the transparency. The hats are a little off, but the eyes are almost perfect. To me, it's the eyes that make or break a portrait. If the eyes are wrong you'll never completely capture the expression of the subject.

 Now I just have to fix the nose , the lips and retouch the color here and there. Then I can start on the other face. I may take a break from it though and let what I have done dry to avoid an accidental disaster.
Happy painting!

You're way off!

That's what Rodney Dangerfield said he would hear when he asked for directions. It bears true with my painting. Got a lot done but unfortunately it's in the wrong spot. I couldn't figure out what was wrong so I did a side by side with a grid overlay. I knew the eyes were off but I didn't realize how much, but it's fixable. The lips and the nose need work too. Have a look.

I did this in GIMP. It's a free photo editing software downloadable off the web. if you click on the image and then right click and hit view image it will be clear how bad I was off. Oh well, live and learn.