Category Archives: Post-processing

Image seeking word

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Sometimes I capture a photographic image that just seems to cry out for some words, but I don’t always know what words the image is seeking. Here’s an image I made at the reflecting pool in the courtyard of the North Carolina Museum of Art during a visit last April:

I loved the “Zen” feel of this photo, and have been thinking for several months now about how I could best use it with some text. One thought is to use some Photoshop trickery to paint or incise some words on the individual stones. With a little work with the Bevel and Emboss tools, it’s possible to make a pretty convincing fake. Here’s an example, just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

Maybe some of you might have ideas about a nice short quote or a set of words that would go well with this image. Please give me your comments!

By the way, if you’d like to make a quick virtual visit to the NCMoA, a set of my photos from my April visit is on my flickr stream here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21031876@N04/sets/72157624547570665/

Word and image

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Classical calligraphy is frequently combined with some form of image or illustration. While I do some illustration, drawing, and painting, my most frequent form of imagery is digital photography, and I love to find ways to combine my words and photographic images into unified designs. Here’s an example:

This is a T-shirt design, based on a photograph I made at the Gateway National Recreational Area on Sandy Hook, New Jersey (for those in the know, the specific location is Gunnison Beach, the infamous “nude beach” – no nudes present when I made the photo in April, though). The text at the bottom is hand calligraphy, and was originally written in black ink on white paper. I scanned it into my Mac Pro, brought it into Photoshop, and changed the text color to match colors sampled from the photo. Finally, I added some “sand” texture to the words “Sandy Hook,” and layered the whole design up in Photoshop.

This design was published in the Annual Review issue of Letter Arts Review in the spring of 2010.