Mitchell Surprenant

I feel like I’ve abandoned this blog for greener pastures, and for that I apologize. I haven’t really been in too much of a political-ranting mood lately, so I suppose this will be an update on my life?

I’m still in the middle of God’s Country. For anyone who has ever lived in Lynchburg, you’re quite familiar with the LU monogram on the side of Candler’s Mountain. I don’t mean to offend, but to call it an eyesore is a bit of an insult to eyesores. But that’s a topic for another blog.

As I’ve been trying to re-focus again on photography, I’m looking for excuses to go places I wouldn’t normally go. I tried like hell to get a decent shot of the Blue Ridge mountains off of 221, but there was no decent place to stop. Since I’ve been working midshifts, though (10 to 630p, usually), I can always catch the sunset.

On one of these particular midshift days, I was talking with a co-worker about where I should take the sunset shot I was looking for. “What about the LU gazebo?” she suggested. Prior to this moment I was under the impression that the gazebo was private (Liberty) property. So, after much debate about how exactly to get to said gazebo and how often I would get lost, I resolved to find it and grab a shot of the sunset over the mountains.

What a payoff. I’ve lived in this city for almost 2 years now, and had never experienced something as beautiful in nature as this sunset. Since I was already up there, I decided also to get a panoramic shot of the city from the same view.

Getting this photo printed is a whole different story. I brought the 9.25MB file to the other Walgreens in town, and the file size was too big to produce an 8×36 or 6×36 print. Photographer friends, how to you print your panoramics?

Of all the useful information on the internet, there’s no tutorial on how to make the “burned toast” effect in Photoshop. You know what I mean. Short of rigging a Jesus toaster, there isn’t an easy way to make this effect without some serious knowledge of Photoshop. Till now.

What you’ll need:

• An image of toast. I got mine courtesy of WikiHow. It’s Creative Commons.
• The image or images you want to toast. I’ve used several of The Gipper for my tutorial. A black and white photo with a clean background works best.
• A copy of Photoshop or GIMP. This is essential.

1. Open the image of toast. If it’s a little burned (like mine is), use the dodge tool to lighten it up.

2. Open the image you want to toast. I’m going to make some Reagan Toast.

3. Then, you’ve got to strip out everything that isn’t the person, unless you want it in the photo. In this case, the flag has to go. I don’t want to mess with it this time. Don’t worry about accuracy below the neck. You won’t need it.

4. Also known as THE HARDEST STEP. This is where a black and white photo comes in handy, because most of the work is done for you. After converting the image to Grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale), you need to alter the levels (Image>Adjustments>Levels, or Ctrl+L) so you have almost nothing but black and white, with very little gray.

A little gray is okay, but your image has to be discernible in black and white. Tool around with the levels to find something that works. I spent 30 minutes trying to get the levels right on this particular Reagan image, so here’s one I made earlier:

(I told you it wasn’t gonna be easy).

5. Now comes the fun part. Select everything that isn’t your new picture using the Magic Wand tool.
Note: If your image contains text, make sure to select the inside of Ps, Rs, Os, Qs and other open letters.
Then select the inverse. (Select>Inverse, or Shift+Ctrl+I). Ctrl+Drag your image onto the toast. You may need to resize (Edit>Free Transform, or Ctrl+T).

6. Photoshop will put the image onto its own layer, which is important. If it doesn’t, please make the new image on its own layer.

7. Poke out the eye of the background layer (the toast) and make sure the Reagan layer is selected. Then, Select>Color Range. This is where you select the darkest part you can. You can try to select on the little screen they give you, but it’s easier to select on the actual image.  What you select will show up as white, or black if you invert. (Again, I’m switching back and forth between Reagans.) Make sure the toast isn’t visible when you do this.

8. Once it’s all selected, click OK. Untick the eye on your Reagan layer, tick the eye on your toast and make your toast layer blue. This will leave a selection on your toast in the shape of your Reagan.

9. Select your style of burnt toast with the burn tool. For best results, use an exposure of between 65-85%. Any more will be too dark, but lighter creates a nice “light burnt” effect. Back to the Reagan with him holding the GIPPER baseball jersey, it would look something like this:

Nice, eh? Now you can go back and forth to the Reagan and select lighter grays and burn them with a lesser exposure than your blacks, but be careful. It tends to accentuate wrinkles and is a pain in the ass to do.

I recommend going back at least once more and burning the whites in your Reagan to around 20% with one pass-through.

Questions? Comments? Leave them below! Here are my final results. All images are CC-BY-SA.

Julie and I invested in a Canon Rebel XT recently. I love it. Every little thing it does is magic. One of my first purchases regarding the camera was (of course) clear filters to protect the lenses. I was going to go with just the straight-up clear filters, but the guy at Ritz Photo was convincing enough to sell me on UV filters, “like sunglasses for your camera,” was his pitch.

I figured what the heck, right? It’s only a few dollars more and maybe I’ll get some use out of them some really sunny day. I put them on the lenses and didn’t think about them.

That was until about 2 weeks ago. I wanted to shoot at 100 ISO outside, because it’s just too much fun to see my photos with almost no noise in them. I affixed the UV lens and went out to shoot in the generally sunny day. In affecting how much light entered the camera, the UV lens has to be turned, so I did so, and for comparison, I took one at the least-powerful setting. Check out the result, though. These photos were both shot at the same ISO, same f-stop, same shutter speed:

Low filter versus high filter:

As I noted in a previous post, I went nuts when I realized that one of my photos had gone un-attributed for months.

Well, my efforts to rectify the situation proved fruitful. Twitter is probably my favorite tool when it comes to communication, and that’s how the problem was solved.

Does this work for you? http://tr.im/zb92 I put the same notice on my website: http://tr.im/zb9z Let me know! (link)

Followed by:

I completely understand where you are coming from- it’s so easy to get images and forget to give credit, that’s the last thing I’d want to do to another artist! (link link)

So yeah, that works for me. Copyright crisis averted, but maybe I’m not going to have as much luck as next time. Thanks for clearing the whole thing up, Delia, and you’re more than welcome to use those awesome photos in the future, provided a link is given.

Yes, it’s true. One of my photos was stolen!

When Kari Byron came to Eastern Illinois on September 26, 2007 (not 2006 as the EXIF data implies), I had use of a Canon Rebel XTi from the school. I took this opportunity to use the camera to take lots of photos of the Mythbusters star, and uploaded them to FlickR. All of that set can be found here.

I didn’t think too much of it till I tried (in vein) to get a few of my shots uploaded to Wikipedia’s article about her. I did the same thing for Jim Edgar. At least that one stuck.

Stumbling around the internet as I often do, I came across a website called Current.com and an article by an enthusiastic writer going by the moniker “Delia the Artist.” I was floored to see my photo accompanying the article. But i was even more floored when I quickly hit Ctrl+F to search for where they had attributed my work back to me. They hadn’t.

The article linked back to Delia’s webpage and, sure enough, under Interview Archive was my picture again next to the article. (Scroll down or just search for “Kari”)

/facepalm

So, I comment on the current.com article and @reply her on Twitter (@DeliaTheArtist). Still awaiting a reply, and not wanting my plight to go unnoticed, I also used the contact form on her website.

Delia,

As a photographer, I’m proud of the work I do. I work hard to make my work desirable. But I tend to get really pissed when someone takes my work out of context and presents it as their own.

You’ve done just that with your interview with Kari Byron. I read the interview (http://current.com/items/90091857_interview-with-kari-byron.htm) and actually rather enjoyed it. But, unfortunately, I’m not here to compliment you on the article. The photo you used for your interview is MINE.

I’m more than allowed to defend my own copyright for the photo of Ms. Byron (on FlickR: http://tinyurl.com/laqguo), as it was not a work-for-hire. I uploaded that whole set to FlickR knowing that it would receive lots of views and more than a few comments.

What I didn’t expect to was to have the photo stolen and used on a website without attribution (which is where the Creative Commons license comes in ).

There’s not even an attempt to link the photo (on current.com or your own website) back to my FlickR profile. The photo on your website is hosted on TinyPic.com. Thanks, seriously.

Now, I like to think of myself as a nice guy. But I worked pretty hard to make sure people knew that photo was taken by me. Whenever anyone on FlickR wants to use my photo, they send me a message, and I’m more than happy to oblige, with attribution.

I believe that your intent was not malicious, but I’d like to remedy this as soon as possible.

I wanted to make sure I contacted you in as many ways as possible so my message was not ignored. I’ve commented on the current.com article, @replied you on Twitter and have (now) used the contact form on your website. I don’t want to send a DMCA notice to your host, but that’s the next step I’ll take if I don’t hear from you soon.

Regards,
Mitch Surprenant

http://www.mitchsurp.com

I’ve also contacted TinyPic about getting it removed from there, so I guess we’ll see. I now know what content creators get so frustrated about when it comes to copyright.

I’d like at the very least attribution in the article and website and acknowledgment of wrongdoing. We’ll see what I get.

Update: Drama averted.