few for two

Great tones. Fun story.

"The need for humor is like the need to breath"

 

-Woody Allen

very nice

Lovely control of colors and composition. Love to see more of your work.

Please don't take this the wrong way. This is a definite 7/7. I immediatly got the message and a smile. I thought of two things; 1) The famous Dogs playing Poker velvet painting, and 2), this sort of looks like an overweight Russle Crowe telling the dog to get lost or you are next on the menu.

Funny!

Thanks for bringing our attention to this portfolio elves. What fabulous story-telling pictures. Beautiful treatment, expressive subjects and results I would be more than proud to have taken. Congrats Rasto!

wow, incredible shot, the set up is perfect and the facial expression and posture of the man realy compliment the background. well done!

Ahoj Rasto. Excellent shot. Congratulations to POW. Peter

Top notch! I particularly like the triangular flow created by the man's face,(great expression)the dogs head and the food. Both the background and foreground are beautifully rendered. Love it.7/7

It's a great picture as are all of those in the folder. It does however look somewhat flat and the dog seems to have been 'stuck on'?

I agree the triangular flow among man view, dog view and plate is really interesting, great colors and the whole scene I think is quite expressive... 7/7

this is not a folder. this is real photo with real dog and colored in ps :-)

i do agree that elves choosen a very original picture, and all the recent pictures this photographer posted lately share with this one a style, a hidden signature if you want to put it this way. I also agree the triangular flow is a strong point of interest into this image.

 

About the tecniques used to realize it i have the following questions:

 

1. was the picture originally in colour or b/w before painting?

2. which are exactly the painting tecniques used? (layers/brushes/brushes' settings) I think that many photographer in here aspire to achieve such results, and since painted pictures are regularly posted and generally appreciated on this forum would be nice getting into this tecnique and do it public.

3. the background seems quite detailed while being relatively darker than the subject, also it doesnt seem too far from it. If it is so, flash illumination (even if smooth and directive) would have been sufficient to render such background? was it painted later?

 

anyhow, it is a striking image, wonderfully realized and worth of attention from us all.

 

regards

giuseppe

I love the photograph. How was it made? It looks very very similar to Andrzej Dragan's photographs. His photo's also look like they are painted with light in some fashion.

Totally amazing and beautiful image. Absolute perfection. Truely art in the finest sense of the word.

an excellent concept, Rasto. The use of a kitchen table as a thematic anchor for this series makes them accessible images to many cultures. I suggest you turn down your second (fill) light, as it gives all of the photos an overlit quality that pushes them toward kitsch, rather than metaphors that reflect the deeper psychological issues that they might approach. This is why someone referenced "dogs playing poker" and no one has mentioned Cezanne... t

I must agree that this photo and the whole folder is very interesting. It would be nice to get some technical details on how this image was composed and what are its elements: what is pure photography and what is illustration? I've worked with digital illustrators who produced excellent portraits so close to reality that you would think they were photographs but they weren't. The artist may not feel like revealing his secret however understanding the process may add value to the recognition of the efforts done to produce it.

great photography, and great storytelling.

 

Is it my imagination, or do I see a lot of photographs resembling this style coming out of eastern and northern Europe. It's great stuff.

Mmm, I'm less sure about this. A photograph that wants to be a painting. A photograph that wants to be a painted in heavy oils. It has a look that has (as pointed out above) cropped up before, but it's a look I can't see the attraction in. I'm afraid on my screen it has the murk of manipulation -- I'll admit to being prejudiced against heavily PS'd images.

 

Eek, am I the first person to post a negative comment? It's lonely out here...

Congratulations for this wonderful POW, Rasto. Great story-telling indeed! :-) Nice to see an image that really has something to say and says it with humor. There are a couple of other very nice specimens in your portfolio, and they all complement each other so nicely.

Nice also to see a clean and reasonable usage of Photoshop with the simple aim to add the appropriate mood to a picture.

I found interesting Tom Meyer's suggestion to off the fill flash on one side, but I'm not entirely I agree: an interesting suggestion anyway... Let's see: with a single light, we get more of a 3D effect (added volume) and we get a more dramatic image, probably also a more beautiful result. With even lighting though, it seems to me the photographer managed (for better or for worse?) to give the feel of something very bold, caricatural, almost cartoonish since it's absolutely simplified. I wonder whether making this image more beautiful and more tri-dimentionnal wouldn't actually go against the original goal of telling a story with humor. Maybe, maybe not; anyway, I find Rasto's choice perfectly valid at any rate. In advertising, it happens fairly often for example, that art directors require simple 2-sides lighting, in order to prevent the beauty of the picture from overriding the conceptual impact.

As for the PS work... Rasto said he just colored this image in PS. I certainly respect the viewpoint of photography purists, but I personally feel, that coloring is something that should be regarded nowadays as a simple and perfectly valid usage of the software. What it does is simply allowing photographers to have a greater choice in their pallette. There are many colors that can hardly be obtained in any other way, so why not use a software in order to achieve your exact creative goal...? This isn't reportage or documentary photography, and the only reality that matters in such cases, imo, is the one the photographer saw in his inner world. I find the present coloring very tasteful, as it helps to make the scene even more ridiculous - by suggesting an "all-grey life". What I may find a bit doubtful, on the other hand, is the exagerately yellow skin of the man: it feels sick (at least on my monitor), and I suspect that was the purpose (?), but I feel a slightly more greyish/blueish/pinkish skin tone might have worked better. Anyway, great picture, and the kind of ideas I wish I could have once in a while...

"Thanks for bringing our attention to this portfolio elves."

Good find, indeed. I spend about once a week on this site looking for new photographers and ideas to help me learn, and I have not seen this work yet.

I also admire the use of the painting with light technique here and any specifics from the author on what steps and techniques are used in photoshop (brush choice, brush settings, layer use, etc.) would be greatly appreciated (I assume by others as well). Personally, I'm still focusing on mastering the basics -- basic lighting, composition, and retouching -- but it wouldn't hurt to gain more understanding how PS painting is done in this work for future ref. when I'm ready to try this kind of artistic interpretation.

it is a very funny idea!!! the lightning is well developed and the man reminds me of a Ren & Stimpy's Lummox!!!

In the first half of the twentieth century, some of the most original photographs were products of darkroom and other types of manipulation techniques. Rasto's superb work gives us an idea about what we might expect from the first decades of the twenty-first. Congratulations.

Krasne - videla jsem tuhle fotku na FA ci na Photopostu - srdecne gratuluji - Eliska