Tagged: photoshop

49 multicolored kaleidoscopic patterns like tiles on a wall

11. January 2018

Mining beauty in Kaleidoscopia

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a tutorial about creating kaleidoscopic patterns on Digital Photography School. On that same day there was a lecture about symmetry by Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, on Dutch TV (it’s in Dutch, but very visual, so you may enjoy it even if you don’t understand a word) Can that be a coincidence? Yes, I guess it can. But it sure is remarkable Photoshop To briefly summarize the tutorial: by copying, mirroring and rotating images in Photoshop and by using the Lighten blending mode you can fabricate wonderful symmetrical kaleidoscopic… Read More

Detail of the Color Map of Rotterdam cropped at the city center with all city blocks drawn in a random color

Cartography

23. December 2017

Christmas: a Festival of Light and Color

Christmas is in the grayest and darkest part of the year. As far as nature is concerned, because with Christmas lights and decorations, that lack of light and color is generously compensated nowadays. In this blog post I present two maps that therefore fit very well with the Christmas season: the Light map and the Color map of Rotterdam. Solstice Christmas is the most important Christian holiday. But the origins of the festival date back to before the birth of Jesus. Both the Romans and the Germans did not let the winter solstice on 21 December pass by unnoticed. Understandably:… Read More

The Rotterdam town hall seen from the Delftse Poort building with behind it Timmerhuis, Saint Lawrence Church and the Markthal

Photography

27. November 2017

Making photos through glass – fighting reflections

Last week, together with a number of fellow photographers, I had the opportunity to take photographs from the 37th floor of the Delftse Poort building (formerly known as Nationale Nederlanden). We were, however faced with a challenge: when making photographs through glass it’s not easy to avoid reflections. The blue hour Delftse Poort is one of the highest buildings in Rotterdam, and right in the center. You do not get a chance to take photos from such a place very often, and certainly not during the part of the day that is so popular among photographers: the hour around sunset.… Read More

Black and white photo of the autumn in the Brediuspark in Woerden, The Netherlands with a low sun and the reflection of trees on the water surface, with a sepia tint applied in Photoshop

Photography

10. November 2017

Black and White Photography in Photoshop

There has been a challenge going around on Facebook these days. People post a black and white photo of their daily life for seven consecutive days, without people in it and without explanation. And every day they challenge one of their Facebook friends to do the same. Sooner or later, of course, it was my turn. And it’s a real challenge for me. Photos without people, that’s no problem; on most of my photos, I’m already trying to avoid people. But with black and white, I actually had hardly any experience at all. After all, the world is in color… Read More

Work in progress by the author on a digital graffiti world map on a wall of ten by five metres

Cartography

13. October 2017

Graffiti and Coffee Beans: Two New World Maps

What do graffiti and coffee have in common? Not much, I suspect, except that the average street artist will occasionally drink an espresso or latte. And that they both formed the inspiration for a world map. Cartograffiti More or less at the same time, I finished the work on the World Map Graffiti and the World Map Coffee Beans. They’re two maps with a totally different look and feel, and created in rather different ways. They have, however, one thing in common: when I started, I expected to finish them in one or two days, but it took weeks before… Read More

Detail of the Rotterdam Water Map, shaped like rust patterns on the hull of a ship, zoomed in on the city center and the Kop van Zuid district

Cartography

28. August 2017

Rusty Rivers – the Rotterdam Water Map

On one of my photo tours through Rotterdam I went to Park Quay. At that location, not far from the inner city, often relatively large seagoing ships are moored. This time, one of those ships was in obvious need of some major maintenance. I made some pictures of it, including this one: Rust I can look at this kind of pictures for hours. A lot of things are happening here on a couple of square meters! The red paint on the ship’s hull is irregularly discolored into a wild palette of shades all the way to purple and pink. In… Read More

Spherical panoarama, or little planet, made of twelve photographs taken at the lawn in the little park in front of Saint Lwarence's Church in Rotterdam

Digital art / Photography

19. June 2017

A New Park, a New Panorama: Saint-Lawrence’s Planet

There was a time when I made a lot of spherical and tubular panoramas but the last one, at Kruisplein, dates back to over a year ago. There are two reasons for this. First of all, those little planets are actually quite time-consuming. Well, Photoshop takes a lot of work out of your hands, but you still have to work hard to eliminate minor irregularities, fill in missing information, and tweak details. Secondly, I became a lot more critical in choosing locations. I am looking for special places, geometric shapes, beautiful compositions or other reasons. And I just do not… Read More

Perspective image of a world map made of 30.000 mosaic tiles, zooming in on North America, with the other continents in the distance distance.

Cartography

27. May 2017

Mosaic tiles and peeling paint: three special world maps

Does it happen to everyone or only to map-o-philes like me? You see a ship hull with rust stains or an old wall with peeling paint and you think, hey, that looks like a map. Oceans, continents, mountain ranges, archipelagos, with a little imagination, you can discover a complete fantasy world on such a weathered surface. Okay, most people will pass by without noticing. But for those who want to see it, there is a lot to enjoy. Peeling world map I decided to turn it around and created an image on which peeling paint patterns really shape the continents of… Read More

Artist impression of planet Earth, seen from a location at 50.000 kilometres above the Netherlands, showing the Northpole, Europa and Africa

Space art

17. April 2017

Rotterdam, Netherlands, Europe, Earth, Universe

April 22, the birthday of this blog entry, is Earth Day. There is no better day imaginable to talk about satellite and astronaut photographs of our planet. History The first satellite in orbit around the Earth was, in 1957, the Russian Sputnik-1 (which in fact simply means Satellite-1). However there was no camera on board. The first pictures of the Earth were made a few years later , on April 1, 1960, by the American weather satellite TIROS-1. Since then, our home world has been photographed many times. Some of these images have become iconic, like the Earthrise photograph from… Read More

World map inspired by cubism, showing our planet as a complex system of shapes, colors and lines

Cartography

31. January 2017

A Cubist World Map

No, you better not try to find your hometown or even your country on this cubist world map. Borders, cities, walls and other human constructs are not recognizable in this explosion of colors, shapes and lines. Polygons and blending modes The map was made in Photoshop by overlaying quite a few layers. I made those layers using the filter crystallize, which subdivides an image into polygons in an entirely arbitrary way. I also made a layer of squares that coincide with latitudes and longitudes. After that I generated line drawings from the edges of all those shapes. Eventually I put… Read More