First, let me thank the organizers and sponsors of the Waterfest 2001 Art Exhbition for giving me the opportunity to participate in a really first-rate event. I enjoyed myself tremendously and hope to be back next year, which would be my third time participating.

"What are you doing here?"

The question came up. From the starting point and context of the conversation the person didn't mean why was I at WaterFest? But rather what am I doing to make these Digital Photo Images? At least I hope so.

Starting off with some numbers and the beginning of the process.

25 pieces exhibited.

All started "life" by getting in front of a camera held up to my eye.

A Pentax PZ-1, 35 mm SLR camera, with an 28-80 AF zoom lens.

A Sony Mavica FD-7 digital camera (low resolution 640x480 although in fact half of that since there is some kind of magical double scan) - a four year old camera next month. (there will be a party on the 26th).

A Canon Powershot G1 3.3 megapixel camera.

Common factors: my eye, brain, relative grumpiness on the day and the Georgian Bay photographic zone of possibilities. All were colour images except for one image that was shot as "sepia" in the camera itself by using this function in the Sony Mavica FD-7.

Digital Images? What is digital about them?

All the photographs, digital or 35mm, enter the computer (Windows 98 PC). This is where the second part of the image work takes place. After the first part, where the image has been captured in the camera.

Imaging software used: mostly Microsoft Image Composer 1.5 (now redesigned and sold as MS Draw 2000) and some work done with Adobe Photoshop 5.5.

What work exactly do I do on the computer with this software?

Cropping and resizing. Some images look better when cropped from the conventional ratio of a standard 4x6 print. Low height long width landscape shots immediately should come to mind. Strong verticals also can break an image out of the standard ratio for graphic impact to the viewer's eye.

Filters. The magilla gorilla of the process. Both Image Composer and Photoshop have built in filters. I use a selected few of these filters. The effect I look for is either a watercolour look or a watercolour with ink outlines look.

Depending on the photo, its colours, number of colours, visual components, I may simply apply a "dry brush" filter and be satisifed with that result. In some cases, I will apply an "ink outlines" filter first, evaluate the result and then apply a "dry brush" filter. I may reverse that sequence. It all depends on the image and the results.

A side comment about filters: these packages come with some 50 to 100 filters. I have never bothered to count them all. For what I do, 90 percent of them are useless. A friend of mine had tried using Image Composer and had the bad luck of applying different filters and got mostly awful results and gave up before finding the handful of filters that are useful, in my opinion, for working with photo images.

Image Size One other activity that I did with a couple of these images. I increased the image size. Before embarking on a huge technical babbling session, let me ease your mind. In a nutshell, I took a low resolution image into Photoshop. Then changed the Image Size, by increasing the Dots Per Inch from 72 or 300 up to 600 dpi. I also increased the number of pixels, and occasionally increased print size to a specific size. What that does is increase the amount of information the computer can use when printing the image. It creates some pretty hefty image file sizes (146mb, 52mb, for example).

It doesn't work for me in every case. Some low resolution images of mine only seem to be enlargeable, if that is a word, to 5x7 inches. However, a lot of this is subjective and a lot of variation has shown up depending on the image. When I speak about the image, I mean how many colours, how much detail, are there very strong graphic elements. I am also continuing to experiment with all of this.

Two specific examples: If you attended the show and saw my exhibit, you might remember two pictures: three maple sap buckets on a tree and a fall foliage shot that was made from under a tree and showed many large black branches and the tree trunk against the orange leaves.

Both of these were low resolution Mavica camera images "pushed up" using Photoshop.

The three sap buckets image had a dry brush filter applied and the ink outlines filter applied twice.

Both images had reduced colour palettes, which is to say that one was orange and black mostly, and the other was blue grey and black and white.

Also, both images were strong graphical compositions to begin with.

I said above that a lot of this judgement of relative success is subjective. One of the low resolution Mavica camera images that I took two fall seasons ago, I pushed beyond 5"x7" and didn't make me overly happy, but I have exhibited it on three different occasions and a number of people have liked it. One person liked it above all the other images. Which is a lesson to me.

Note on the images in this article: The top of the article orange flower image is a low resolution Sony Mavica image. The two images within the body of the article are referred to in the text, however, neither has been filtered in the versions shown.

Printing?

Some images were printed using a 300 dpi HP Deskjet. Others were printed using a 2400x something or other dpi printer from HP. (sorry but there is a limit to my technogeekosity, and memorizing all those numbers puts me into a basic snooze, I'd rather be taking my camera out for a walk).

Paper used ranged from some moderate weight art paper cut down to fit in the printer to standard glossy premium photo paper to canvas texture paper designed for inkjet printers.

One last thought The orange flower at the top of this page. Do you think it would look better in a square format?