When I went to Paris a few weeks ago I fixed an idea in my mind that rather than censor myself before I took a shot, I would take as many shots as I could and then review them when I got home. The result is that I took over 900 shots in two weeks.
There was a time when I read articles by photographers talking about the large number of shots they had taken on a trip, usually in the context of how much space this took up on their hard drive, and I would wonder how they could possibly have taken that many shots without developing a trigger happy attitude that reduced the photographic value of everything they shot.
Paris is a very attractive city. If you like taking shots of the frontages of old buildings, and I do, then there are gems everywhere. And then there is the river, and the skylines. So I didn’t find it at all difficult to take the shots, and storing jpegs on 2GB cards was no effort at all.
Sorting, stretching, cropping, and cleaning up 900 plus images is a different matter and I have been busy with other things, so there are still many images to go through. So here is a small selection of frontages and other architectural attractions of Paris:
Here is a way to make grungy type using displacement maps in photoshop.
Create a photoshop file of something interesting (see below) and save as an 8bit psd. Call it popsicle.psd (well you have to call it something).
Type your text. It will be a layer in your psd file.
Go to filter/distort/displace
A box will come up to tell you that your text will be rasterized. Click OK
Now you in the displacement dialogue box.
Follow the instructions. You have to choose some values. The default values are modest. If your file and your typeface are big, you may find that you can choose much bigger values in the dialog box.
Choose popsicle.psd as the displacement map file.
Look at the results.
Don’t like it? Undo and try again with different values.
Do like it? Want more? Do it again and get more effect.
Once you have committed your type layer to ‘grunge’ it is no longer a type layer but it is still in a separate layer, so if you come back to the image later and don’t like the effect you can always keep the image, junk the layer, and start again - perhaps with a different typeface.
Here it is a before and after:
And here is an after with it plugged in over an image.
And a final word - you can use the image (in this case the flower) as the displacement map but it pays to play around and choose a displacement map that interacts well with the type. In this case the flower is more or less just in the middle of the ‘page’ so it is only going to interact with the middle of the typeface.
Here is the actual displacement map I used.
Nikon D200 with 12-24mm lens
Nikon P5100 at maximum focal length
