photographic art by russel ray photos san diego

Many decades ago when I had several years experience with photography, my goal was to have a huge collection of lenses for all purposes—fisheye, wide angle, super wide angle, zoom, ultra zoom, double ultra zoom, triple ultra zoom………

Although it might be nice to have all those lenses in today’s world, I find that I am completely satisfied with my Tamron 28-300mm lens and Photoshop. Photoshop has so many cool features that allow me to simulate all those lenses so well that no one would know what I had done unless I told them.

A good example is this Photographic Art creation:

That is based on a picture of a mural in the Little Italy area of San Diego. Ah, but I lie to you. That is based on FOUR pictures of a mural in the Little Italy area of San Diego. It was a wide mural, so it would not fit in my camera considering I couldn’t stand across the street because cars and utility poles would have been in the picture. I could have stood in the street, but it’s a busy street, and I know what typically happens when a 200-pound human takes on a 4,000-pound car. My only choice, then, was to take four pictures while standing on the walkway, just three feet or so from the mural. Here are the four original pictures:

Along with the mismatch in color contrast, brightness, exposure, etc., you can see that the perspective is going to be weird, especially for the two end pictures. This pretty much tells you where I was standing in order to leave cars, people, and poles out of the picture—right between the two ladies if you can’t tell.

First I corrected the perspective of the pictures, which gave me these four pictures:

Then I used Photoshop’s Photomerge function to merge the four pictures into one picture, giving me this:

After that it was just a question of making it into Photographic Art.

The one question that Julian had is why does the woman who is sitting down have a mustache. The attire certainly leads to one believing that it is a woman… Do Italian women have mustaches? Inquiring minds want to know.