19 Jun 13. A half mile down the road from out home sits Eglon School, a now retired 8 grade school house that my father and his two sisters attended in the late teens and twenties of the 20th Century. My father attended all eight grades and then went no further as he was needed on the farm. He had a successful fishing career for 11 years before being frozen in at Boeing during the WWII. He had spent his fishing time off working as a sweeper for the company, but upon being frozen there he never returned to fishing afterward. Instead he stayed with the company for over 30 years rising from that lowly position as sweeper to the number two position in the company in the Maintenance Division. Not too bad a career for an 8th grader. My uncle, his brother-in-law, had a similar education at nearby Hansville grade school, leaving the farm to become the primary businessman in Hansville, owning and running the general store, gas station, cafeteria, boat house, resort cabins and was additionally the Post Master for the town. Again with just an 8th grade education. Today we routinely find high school and even college graduates who can't even make change! Makes one wonder what has happened to our educational system. Today's submission is a 10 layered image, the creation of which will be detailed in the following paragraph, in case such things might interest you. Back to the standard fare tomorrow. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 8.

Now here is what I did. I've included a thumbnail of the image (above) straight out of the camera for reference. Starting with the original image (background layer), I duped that layer as I always do and then cropped out a bit of stuff that I didn't think necessary. Duped that layer and cloned out a few wires and other annoying things.Then I added a texture layer to bring out all the details in the old wooden building. Then I combined all those layers into a new layer. At that point I created a new blank layer which I filled with 50% gray color and changed the blending mode to overlay thereby making it a dodge and burn layer, to be used just like the procedure in the wet darkroom with a print. This was needed because the lights inside the building were turned off and I wanted them on. To do so I selected all the windows (you can employ any and all the selection tools you like for this step) and then, using a white brush set at 10% opacity, painted over the selected areas (windows) thereby making them lighter resulting in the effect of having turned on the interior lights. I duped that resultant layer and literally painted in some clouds on the left side of the image to decrease the bright area there. Then I added a curves layer to adjust the grass, another layer to create a vignette using the same dodge and burn technique as before, and finally the last layer in which I did some selective noise reduction. This was not camera noise but graininess caused by the manipulations. The entire layer stack was then flattened and saved out in the sRGB color space for viewing on the web.

19 Jun 13. A half mile down the road from out home sits Eglon School, a now retired 8 grade school house that my father and his two sisters attended in the late teens and twenties of the 20th Century. My father attended all eight grades and then went no further as he was needed on the farm. He had a successful fishing career for 11 years before being frozen in at Boeing during the WWII. He had spent his fishing time off working as a sweeper for the company, but upon being frozen there he never returned to fishing afterward. Instead he stayed with the company for over 30 years rising from that lowly position as sweeper to the number two position in the company in the Maintenance Division. Not too bad a career for an 8th grader. My uncle, his brother-in-law, had a similar education at nearby Hansville grade school, leaving the farm to become the primary businessman in Hansville, owning and running the general store, gas station, cafeteria, boat house, resort cabins and was additionally the Post Master for the town. Again with just an 8th grade education. Today we routinely find high school and even college graduates who can't even make change! Makes one wonder what has happened to our educational system. Today's submission is a 10 layered image, the creation of which will be detailed in the following paragraph, in case such things might interest you. Back to the standard fare tomorrow. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 8.

Now here is what I did. I've included a thumbnail of the image (above) straight out of the camera for reference. Starting with the original image (background layer), I duped that layer as I always do and then cropped out a bit of stuff that I didn't think necessary. Duped that layer and cloned out a few wires and other annoying things.Then I added a texture layer to bring out all the details in the old wooden building. Then I combined all those layers into a new layer. At that point I created a new blank layer which I filled with 50% gray color and changed the blending mode to overlay thereby making it a dodge and burn layer, to be used just like the procedure in the wet darkroom with a print. This was needed because the lights inside the building were turned off and I wanted them on. To do so I selected all the windows (you can employ any and all the selection tools you like for this step) and then, using a white brush set at 10% opacity, painted over the selected areas (windows) thereby making them lighter resulting in the effect of having turned on the interior lights. I duped that resultant layer and literally painted in some clouds on the left side of the image to decrease the bright area there. Then I added a curves layer to adjust the grass, another layer to create a vignette using the same dodge and burn technique as before, and finally the last layer in which I did some selective noise reduction. This was not camera noise but graininess caused by the manipulations. The entire layer stack was then flattened and saved out in the sRGB color space for viewing on the web.