Real : Surreal

This past weekend I spent some time playing with Photoshop and a program called Photomatix, as well as an additional plug-in tool that works inside of Photoshop. My Photoshop skills are lacking, in spite of my profession. I'm much better with Illustrator, but I'm working on developing my talents with various programs, and right now I'm having a lot of fun experimenting.

The first image below is a picture I took at work with my sub-par Canon SD1000 "point & pray & click" camera. The image below that is what I came up with after running it through several different filters and tools. Also, I added a crow that I had found in a picture that someone else had taken, both because I love crows, and because I thought it gave the image that much more of a surreal feeling. Clearly I wasn't going for realism here. Oh, and I also flipped the image, as it just seemed to flow better with the "action" going left to right. And while I don't think that this little exercise demonstrates any greatness from an artistic or technical level (I imagine most "real" artists would rip this apart in seconds with a large list of mistakes and flaws), I like it personally. It's the look I was striving for, and it makes me happy. So I'm sharing it with you.