Flowers gallery

Flowers macro - Images by Sergey Shalatskiy

Creating flower images is not an easy task, and requires a lot of work, thinking, and, often, luck.
I used various processing and shooting techniques for these images. Most of them have been processed in Photoshop using standard set of tools, with multiple layers and filters.
The most recent ones are taken using Lensbaby 3G. It is a very versatile and fun to use lens. Imagine that it works like a zoom from a very decent enlargement and minimal distance for macro images to a pretty long lens for shooting regular scenes. And, the area of sharper focus can be adjusted to be in any part of an image: top, bottom, left, right, center... Lensbaby produces a very special bokeh pattern, practically impossible to simulate with Photoshop.

3. Her Majesty Symmetry

It was a long time since I blogged here. Today I'd like to present a few thoughts that will influence most further discussions. 

Studies analyzing the movements of human eye looking at an image show that if an image contains simple lines or regular geometric shapes, the eye is attracted to them immediately. It looks like the brain automatically recognizes the shapes and human eye gets focused on these features. The same is true for images containing reflections in water and mirrors, or parts that are repeated in an organized way. These images represent the most universal way of organizing things: symmetry.
Traditional thinking of symmetry usually recognizes reflection symmetry (mirrors) or rotational symmetry (regular geometric shapes and flowers). But a very simple and powerful type of symmetry is the so-called translational symmetry, which is encountered in many images. This kind of symmetry reveals itself when objects of the same shape are located at the same distance along a line (a fence, a colonnade, a row of bricks, parallel lines). Even a text can provide an example of translational symmetry:
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text.

One more kind of symmetry that is not often recognized as a symmetry is proportion. To understand this, one needs to embrace the mathematical notion of symmetry. An object is symmetric with respect to a given operation (transformation) if it preserves some property. Thus, if we increase the size of a rectangle in such a way that the ratio of the large and small sides of it stays the same, the enlarged rectangle will be symmetrical to the original. Therefore, all ancient works related to architectural proportions are about symmetry in contemporary mathematical sense! Interestingly, ancient Greeks and Vitruvius used the word Symmetry to denote the satisfying arrangement of a balanced distribution of the elements of a whole (in other words, right proportions).

This said, the Symmetry becomes a very powerful concept uniting many properties of images that are attractive to a human eye. We will see further that many so-called compositional rules in visual arts can be derived from the notion of Symmetry as briefly discussed here.
Symmetry also plays a profound role in history, religion, science and culture, including visual, musical and literary arts. Some of these relations will be discussed further in this blog.

Beauty and brain recognition in fine arts and music

2. So, is it all about recognition?

Can the beauty be recognized and appreciated as a set of familiar patterns? Can it be analyzed?
First, I'd like to bind the discussion to the definition of beauty and beautiful, and derive some conclusions from it.
Let's refer to the dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/beautiful):
Beautiful: having beauty; having qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, think about, etc.; delighting the senses or mind: a beautiful dress; a beautiful speech. 
    In other words, the definition refers to the feeling or emotion of pleasure someone has when absorbing information from a certain source, and obviously it would be a mistake to explain the feelings only by a mechanism of brain recognition. Feelings and emotions are known to accompany acts of perceiving any information, and have deep influence on our behavior and, ultimately, the very survival of humans, by providing responses from unconscious mind that help us to immediately react to various stimuli.
Unconscious reactions have 2 sources: inborn and conditioned.
Inborn reactions have long history and the very title of Anthony Steven's book The Two Million-Year-Old Self  suggests it. So, your emotions have a lot to do with your inherited self, with a two million-year old history of your Self.
But, is the beauty of music necessarily related only to your unconscious?
Many researches, e.g. described in a comprehensive book The Psychology of Music show that personal preferences and the very ability to perceive music depends on each person's experience and exposure to certain kinds of music. The preferences also change with age, as a person gets more experience listening to and learning various musical styles and/or cultures. For example, 4-graders in US schools show different preferences to musical styles and cultures than 7th-graders. Also, both groups listened longest to what they preferred, which I interpret as a result of their better satisfaction, and that ultimately this fact can influence a person's perception of the beautiful formed during previous experiences in music. 
The Psychology of Music also contains evidence that recognition is important for perceiving sounds as musical or non-musical, and apprehending melody, rhythm, harmony and other components of music, that are necessary for the very creation of musical preferences. And, common sense suggests that in order to have preferences or, ultimately, consider and feel that something is beautiful, one needs to recognize various musical pieces and to be able to identify the differences between them.

What about perception of visual arts? Is it any different or similar to perception of music?
Stay tuned for more on my blog.

Beauty and brain recognition in fine arts and music

Part 1. The eternal question

What is a beauty? - It seems to be a haunting question challenging minds for centuries.
Leonardo Da Vinci tried to get his own answer, and famous pictures of a human body with circles, rectangles and triangles around it that show the best proportions considered to be the most pleasing, beautiful and attractive. The golden section is considered the ultimate rule of proportion for artists for a long time.
We look at a picture and immediately can decide whether it is pleasant and beautiful or not.
And musical sounds can be felt and perceived as beautiful or terrible, depending on many reasons.

What is the secret of beauty? Why people love? - So many questions that do not have exact answers.
I think there are many reasons why a human being considers or feels that something is beautiful.
And this is why there is no single answer. But I truly believe that there are the same fundamental reasons and principles that cause people to recognize, feel, understand, and appreciate (in this order, as I'll explain later) the beautiful in the arts and surrounding world.

Let's start with a well-known fact: not all people love the same musical pieces, musical styles and trends.
Most of western people do not like, appreciate, recognize and understand Chinese music, especially the ancient traditional Chinese music. Often they describe Chinese music as unrecognizable cacophony. Why is that? The answer may lie in a simple fact that they never have been listening to this kind of music before. Europeans who live for a long time in China (or, for that matter, in any Eastern country) start to understand and like the Eastern music more and more as they become more exposed to it.

I can offer a simple explanation to the fact: in order to appreciate certain music, one needs to recognize it, hear melody, rhythm, harmony,  differentiate it from other pieces or songs, and PREDICT (this is very important) how it develops and where it leads in terms of the basic attributes/components of musical pieces I just mentioned.
An ability to predict the musical development is very important and is a part of the brain recognition of the music. For instance, a resolution to consonance is easily recognizable by a trained ear (read: brain), and leads to a satisfaction, a feeling that supports successful recognition of any kind, whether it is music, art, surrounding nature or anything else that we can sense with all of our five (or six) senses. Prediction is a way to test the result of recognition, and if it is confirmed, a human can feel more comfortable and safe, which leads to a feeling of satisfaction. Satisfaction then transforms itself into the recognition of beauty.

A giant leap to visual arts example: it is well-known that a composition is considered good if it incorporates simple geometric shapes like lines, triangles, rectangles and circles. Simply put, a human brain can easily recognize these well-structured objects and thus establish a foundation for recognizing a picture as a whole.
Recent researches (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060926171101.htm) show that people score prototypical (generalized, average) images of human faces and other objects higher than individual images. Prototypes are easier recognized by human brain, therefore their preference as more beautiful images.

More to come... Stay tuned.

New album, new images, new tools

This Thursday, Tony Sweet has presented his latest work, shared his techniques at Baltimore Camera Club. He uses Topaz and Alien Skin plugins a lot, and I decided to give them a try.
I was very much satisfied by the first experiences I had. I've created a new photo album on my Facebook page: http://tinyurl.com/yggs9zm and hope people will like the results, too.
Topaz Adjust has a lot of settings to use to adjust ;) the photos, and, more importantly to me, it has
an ability to save the settings under your own name, which saves a lot of time when processing similar
images, and allows to reuse your settings whenever you want (just be specific enough when naming new settings, so that you recognize them later). The sharpening algorithm works very well, and does not
increase the noise too much (or at all?).
Alien Skin Watercolor effect is amazing and has a lot of presets and controls to adjust the image as you wish. I still have to figure out if I can add my own textures to the tool.

Baltimore camera club

A couple of years ago, I've come across the web site of the oldest camera club in the country, Baltimore Camera Club (http://www.baltimorecameraclub.org). I joined the club and that event changed my life dramatically, since I've got an opportunity to socialize with friend photographers, both professionals and
amateurs, and get a lot of information about photography, contests, tips and techniques, and participate in
field shoots, which is often a good way to learn or get new ideas.
I've started photography long ago, but after joining the club, I became an addict.
Presentations made by well-known guest photographers and club members are very useful and instructional there, and I am happy to share this with you.
If you are in the area, stop by, you may be surprised.

A Record Snowfall

The last December surprised Marylanders with a record snowfall. It wasn't really outstanding for the whole country, but for Baltimore, this was a really big adventure.
I grabbed my camera at once when the snow has started, but after I came home, nothing really outstanding came up.
But the next day... It was a sunny Sunday morning, and it was awesome. I can't remember this clean and clear snow and skies since I was back in Russia in my youth.
See for yourself here:
http://www.photoshelter.com/gallery/Record-showfall-in-Maryland/G0000bN7SqrbcrSI

It wasn's too cold, and I've spent the entire day shooting in Timonium, Cockeysville, Hunt Valley, Yourk Rd and Mount Carmel Rd areas. Maryland is well known by its horses, and I had a good chance to photograph horses in the snow.

A few technical tips for photographing snow:
Overexpose 1-1 1/2 stop compared to the meter (check histogram if you have it, or use highlights view mode, to make sure not to blow highlights).
If you can use histogram, try to set color mode and check all 3 for highlights, and expose so that the high end of the histogram is close to the right edge of the histogram window.
Wide angle lenses usually do not require overexposing if you have blue sky in the frame.
Use, but do not overuse the polarized filter. The sky may become too dark or uneven lit if you are not using the polarizer carefully.