Musophobia

A couple of weeks ago, I was taking a little break in a shady garden on my campus when I saw two big, fat, hairy rats. Rats and mice leave me rather indifferent: they don't make me scream, I wouldn't put one on my shoulder, and I ate some rat meat in Thailand but didn't find it particularly good (nor bad). But it would probably have been a nice snapshot if the battery of my point-and-shoot hadn't been dead.
Anyway, here is another shot inspired by these creatures...

The music room

L'heure de l'apéritif

I have been living in the US for a couple of years, but I still haven't figure out how to translate"apéritif". I'm sometimes afraid that the whole concept just doesn't exist here... Anyway, Birthday Party's music and the desire for an early evening drink inspired me that little movie...



For that movie, I prepared the background in Photoshop with several pictures I had taken (my kitchen counter, icebergs in Greenland, a telephone box in London). I then imported them in After Effects and made some color correction. I filmed my torso against a green background and used a chroma key and masks to isolate it.

Playing with lights

For this image, I used several pictures of lights taken at a very low shutter speed while moving my camera.
I then played with colors, contrasts and blend modes in Photoshop, and added the two silhouettes.

Isla Vista's Essence

The sunset, the moon, the bike, and the oil platform... Isla Vista's Essence?

For that HDR image, I shot three shots of the scene at different exposure (f/14 1,3s; f/14 0.3s; f/14 5s), then merged them in Photoshop. I removed ghosts, sharpened the bike and the ground, and slightly saturated the sky.

Another hot Summer day

Today was a really hot day. A ridiculously hot day. That's quite unusual here, in Santa Barbara. Fortunately, we don't have skyscrapers; imagine what might have happened...



This was made in Photoshop and After Effects. I started with a stock image of a skyline (found on stock.xchng and a picture of one my girls holding a watering can. I isolated the buildings in Photoshop and placed them in 3D layers in After effects. I animated the buildings with the puppet tool, and the arm and the hand with keyframes. I followed this tutorial  for the clouds, and played with lights for the shadows and the sky colors variation. Finally, I used Audacity for the music, modifying a short excerpt of "Cripple Creek".

Fly, raspberries, fly...

Raspberries season is almost over. Too bad: those little fragile red things are among my favorite fruits.
Hopefully those eight will reseed themselves. Fly, raspberries, fly!

I used three pictures for that image: my hand, a cloudy sky, and raspberries on a white background.
I duplicated the sky twice and played with the blending modes, converted the sky and my hand to black and white, saturated the raspberries and added some motion blur.
Makes me hungry...