Icelandic Landscape Calendar

[hearst]

I went there in August, with Elderhostel.  That is not the best way to go on a photo tour unless you like taking pictures in the middle of the day from a moving bus.  Nevertheless, I got a few decent shots, which you can see on the attached site under Brand New.Joe Hearst's blog

[billh]

The calendar is excellent! You created the entire thing in Photoshop?

[kaelaria]

I'm extremely interested in how the calendar was created!  It' looks fantastic!

[Leif]

Shameless plug:

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in trying something like this, and having it printed, my uncle and aunt, Bill & Sandra, are doing all my printing, and an excellent job too, binding and all being very clean & professional without exception.

They own & operate Contact Photo Arts in Grand Forks B.C.: http://contactphotoarts.com/
email:

I'm currently in Ontario, so we've been coordinating & shipping things from afar - quite smoothly.

Cheers - Leif

[Leif]

Hello - I posted some messages here in May, asking for advice for photography in Iceland. Thanks to your advice, I got some great shots that would not have been possible without your feedback. I also managed to make myself familiar with photoshop and produce a calendar. You can view it at the following site: http://www.cachelan.com/album/album258739
I would greatly appreciate feedback, criticism, advice, etc....

FYI: I shot from my Pentax MZ-5n, with a 28-200 and a 20-35. I also had my good old K-1000 body, and old faithful produced some good shots as always. I also borrowed my sister's Pentax Digital Optio WR, but mostly for people/friend shots. I did, however, get one shot on it of a friend sitting on the cliff of Drangey island: the shot was taken from right above her head, looking straight down as she looked up into the camera, and the field depth is amazing: you can see little specks of seagulls over 100M below her feet, and you can see the rock shapes below the surface of the water over 140M down! That is an impressive little camera!

Cheers - Leif Einarson

[WonkyEwok]

Joe,

Thanks - I've just played the pictures-set-to-music from your website - just right for a quiet, rainy Sunday morning. I particularly liked your pictorial shots (? - not quite sure what the category should be called, but the pictures which are fragments of larger scenes). My approach to photography tends to be 'find somewhere / some light which is beautiful and then try to record it'; I'm not good (yet?) at picking out small bits of a scene which will look interesting in themselves.

Best wishes

[pminicucci]

Well done, Leif!

[Leif]

Thanks for all the positive feedback, and for the links to your own website, Joe: many beautiful photos of Iceland.

In regards to how I actually made the calendar: yes, all on photoshop, and I had never used it before. Let me know if there are specific questions you have. I'll try to generally outline: I had my negatives scanned to cd. Chose a canvas size appropriate to printing. I constructed the calendar grid from scratch, which wasn't easy. But once I had the grid made, I could shrink it, warp it, add/remove effects, etc... to fit into the layout of various months. The background was probably my most innovative trick: this surprised me, but my uncle, who owns a photoshop in BC, said he'd never heard of my method, and his customers were also intrigued to hear about it: I am red-green colour blind, which causes no end to problems with photography, especially those red rocks in green landscapes: lost to me. My friends helped me in such situations. When in photoshop, I used the eye-dropper tool very very frequently, to match colours within the photos with good fade/gradient combinations for the background, not to mention shadows and shading etc...

Some of the backgrounds, like August and September, I constructed by cutting and pasting small segments of the photo itself to form a unified background of the same texture. For instance, behind the grid in September is actually a series of pastes of upside-down/rightside-up clouds from the bottom photo. Some minor touch-ups, strategic bluring, and the lines are not terribly noticeable, certainly not on the printed calendar.

For March (Mars in Icelandic) the background photo actually cuts off half way up the calendar grid. I disguised the cut-off and the begining of the background gradient behind a line in the calendar grid. In the printed version you can just barely notice a small difference, because the photo is textured slightly, while the gradient is utterly smooth.

Let me know if you have other questions/criticisms.

Cheers - Leif