The mythical wanderer across the desert reaches the sea shore. Symbolic of spiritual arrival. (Maspalomas, Gran Canaria).
Shortly after I first posted it in 2008, this photo was chosen by Ken Ichiro Sato for the opening installation of the Rochester Outdoor Museum of Art, now evolved into Big Picture Rochester. Here it is printed to enormous size and covering the wall of a large shopping mall:
Used to illustrate this poem by EDICIONES GUALLAVITO:
De Pedro Salinas
¡Cimeras alegrías tremolantes,
gozo inmediato, pasmo que se acerca:
la frase más difícil, la penúltima,
la que lleva, derecho, hasta el acierto,
perfección vislumbrada, nunca nuestra!
¡Imágenes que inclinan su hermosura
sobre espejos que nunca las reflejan!
PS Mar. 2024
This photo was archived and viewable via my Patreon Gallery but has now returned to public view by request. It received 249 "faves" on Flickr before reset, now 256.
Tags: landscape dune sea wind sahara maspalomas canaria canary island hero traveler silhouette nude Jonathan Charles photo art photography top-f150 jonathan charles
© All Rights Reserved
This is J, one of our twins aged 3, working out how to get down from the frame after easily climbing to the top*.
My name in the family has evolved from "Gramps" to "Danger-Gramps" as my grandchildren come home from exploring adventures with occasional bruises and scraped knees, so it is good that I can show the twins that this is not a new aberration but just a continuation of the process that encouraged them to become the capable and resourceful people they are now...
Please see also Marie & E a year or two later...
*PS after a couple of false starts she managed it by herself.
Tags: child girl portrait action climb education learning art photo jonathan charles
© All Rights Reserved
Walking into this strange scene on the edge of the volcanic island of Lanzarote felt like visiting the early part of the earth's history when nothing lived on land. Hopefully it is not also what the future holds...
PS March 2024: a new higher resolution version to show the nice textures of the rocks...
Tags: lifeless landscape primeval volcanic Lanzarote art photo jonathan charles HELP Groups discussion tips Help tips Groups
© All Rights Reserved
I found a third photo taken when we had returned home after a party at a friend's house. Marie, relaxing by the fire, had pulled up the hem of her rather expensive dress to avoid sitting on it, giving me a nce view of her fancy stockings and looking rahter seductive in the process!
The dress was quite modest when standing up but the stocking tops came into view when she was sitting on a footstool talking with other guests towards the end of the evening. I did wonder how much else was visible to them...
Tech. note: snapped with my old compact camera that was lying around (the rather overdone fill-in flash was not easily adjustable and I didn't want to go looking for my DSLR and miss the moment).
(friends)
© All Rights Reserved
From the original photo "August 1976 - camera club 3" © Suzanne R, JWFotos 1976, 2023.
Suzanne and Johnny have kindly allowed me to apply some restoration to several of their brilliant photos from the 1970s and since. I thought this would be an interesting example of what can be done using simple (non-AI) tools in PhotoShop to bring out more detail than can be seen in the original.
Having spent some time studying digital signal processing I know that no passive filter can increase the information in an image but it is quite possible to make detail information more visible using the right process, in this case the sharpening filter called "unsharp mask", or more correctly "partial negative unsharp mask" which is based on the Fourier spectrum of spatial frequency, a precise measure of detail. With this the detail amplified is everything smaller than the pixel-size chosen. This is based on the finest detail that is adequately visible in the original. But this mainly enhances detail about half that size, which may still look obviously unsharp. So you can repeat the process choosing half that size, and again until you get down to around 1 pixel – and at each stage more and more detail becomes clear. Unfortunately grain, dust and scratches are also "enhanced" so this limits how strong you set the filter each time, and you usually have to do some "cleaning up" afterwards. The process is actually pretty quick but it takes a bit of trial and error to get the settings right and you often have to back-track if you find it producing negative fringes around hard edges or too much grain pattern.
© All Rights Reserved