Over on Karl's Facebook page I've been running a series of
'Postcards from Miltonburg'. I've included one or two on this blog from time to
time to give some colour to recent posts. But it's not an easy thing to achieve
living in a suburb of London, to generate a series of photos that would fit a theme
of Ye Olde Worlde. You have to avoid
modern housing and constructions, people clothed anachronistically for the
period you want to represent, buses and cars thundering past, in fact anything
that breaks the spell.
This really leaves me with very few options locally, just
the local park, hopefully when there are not too many people about and a few
holiday photos that reside in the collection that can be adopted and
manipulated.
Parsloe's Park has
become the edge of the woods around Miltonburg,
photographed from very tight angles to avoid parts of the Becontree Estate in the distance popping up through the trees. Photos
in the collection come in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on how much
I've had to crop. A visit to Cornwall gave me images of Bodmin Moor and
Tintagel which have found their way into the collection along with The Bishop’s
Palace in Lincoln.
That's all well and good, but not only is this world from
the books Olde Worlde, it's also somewhere
else in the universe, with a different sun, planets and moons in the sky and
hence different light.
So now we need the additional tweaks - I need to adjust the
brightness, contrast, colour depth and tone of the picture. A few years back
that would have been quite a task. Getting the photos printed and then scanned
and the amount of processing effort to get them adjusted based on what you had
to work with in the first place would have been incredible. The photo editing
tools were out there, but I find I could spend hours in front of the pc
struggling with these tools not really knowing what was going on and not having
the time to work through and comprehend some of the tutorials.
Now we have these mobile phones devices which do just about
everything except make the morning coffee. (I’m not much of tea drinker.) They
have apps, which are quite simple and quite powerful for image manipulation
that would have taken some computers from my youth ages to achieve and process.
There are quite a few of these apps out there but I’ve found PEStudio (Photo Effect Studio) does just about
everything I need from cropping, re-colouring, light manipulation plus the odd special effect
thrown in for good measure. However I
cannot find it the App Store any longer to tell you who made it, and there are
no credits on the app that I can find. However I’m sure there are many others
that can provide the same. And what’s more the image is transformed into a
whole other world within a matter of minutes allowing me to post it direct to
the page in question. So different from how things used to be.
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| Dungeon in Bishop’s Palace (Lincoln) becomes the Dungeon in Esmay |
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| The Hurlers in the distance on Bodmin Moor (Cornwall) becomes Karl’s long walk home |
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| Parsloes Park (Dagenham) with some cropping becomes secret way to Gerranthaul’s |
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| View from Tintagel Castle (Cornwall) becomes a coastal climb for Karl & Spiker |
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| Own model stone circle becomes gifted with special Solstice light |
