Urban Landscape

During the past couple weeks, I took some photos in downtown Toledo on the subject of Urban Landscape. I also edited them using an online application available directly from Flickr called Picnik. Although this is a good program to edit photos without having to spend a lot of money and can be used from any computer, it will no longer be available after April.
Here is a photo that I took in the Vistula Historic District that I edited with Picnik


I took this photo and others that can be seen at my flickr page using my Kodak EasyShare C813 camera. This camera has 8.2 megapixels and  a 3x optical zoom. After reading the class content for this past week, I decided to check that I was photographing at the highest resolution my camera is capable of. The dimensions of the photos I checked were 2472 X 3296 pixels. Multiplying these together gives 8,147,712 pixels or 8.14 megapixels which is close to the advertised amount of 8.2 megapixels and therefore I know I am shooting at this camera's best resolution. In editing this photo from the original I used the straighten function in Picnik and cropped it to eliminate the light pole to the right and street in the foreground. Although the exposure seemed correct to me, I hit the auto exposure button, which I felt had very little effect. I also used the sharpness tool on this photo. I tend to like my photos to appear natural so only apply a small amount of sharpness so they don't appear oversharpened. I also feel that the contrast and saturation appear natural as is, so I did not apply any correction to those. On a number of the photos I edited a made them slightly cooler in temperature so that the sky would appear more blue rather than the January overcast grey. A lot of the time when I edit photos, I use the histogram and adjust that so that the picture doesn't look over or under exposed. On the picture that was most underexposed of this set, which I named Bar for Lease, I tried this, but was not satisfied with the results. It was too underexposed for this to work well and has color artifacts in it like a picture that was increased in resolution and shows the effects of interpolation.
What attracted me to this particular building is the boarded up windows, fire escape and graffiti, which all fit with my idea of what a photo showing urban landscape is.

First Post

Since I'm planning for this blog to be about art and photography, I decided to write this post about a sculpture I like that is in Perrysburg, OH on the grounds of the old Commodore School buidling. It's called "The Old Town Pump"and was created by Ralph Kleeberger who passed away just this December. He was an educator at Northwood schools and lived in Perryburg. He was involved in the Toledo Area Sculptor's Guild.  He dedicated this sculpture to the children of Perrysburg.
I'm not old enough to have experienced town pumps, but one reason I like this sculpture is that it reminds me of my childhood. We went picnicking out at a roadside rest where there was a water pump that my sisters, brother and I played with when we went there.
For more information about the creation of this sculpture visit http://www.perrysburgarts.org/Kleeberger.html.