Posts Tagged ‘Picture’

I went to see the Painted Photographs exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool today of photographs that have been retouched for use on TV and in the Press.

Due to my own stupidity and incompetence I never made it to the Open Eye Gallery before its new venue so I can’t compare it to the old space.  Its new home is almost on the waterfront in a small but perfectly formed gallery with three rooms and a small shop.

There is an impressive elegance to the design.  It’s a simple uncluttered space with simple wall geometry and sight lines used to incorporate the entrance, reception, retail and first gallery area into one room without the other elements impinging on the gallery space.  Cleverly though the reception desk can see the retail area, entrance and first exhibition area while also acting as the payment point for the shop area without resorting to an exit through the shop design.  It’s the sort of architectural design I can’t help admiring.

I read about the Painted Photographs exhibition of pictures collected by Martin Parr on the BBC website last week.  Some of the commenters on the site get tangled up in the idea that this is a modern art exhibition.  It’s nothing of the sort.  It’s a curious insight into the way things were done before Photoshop became the ubiquitous tool of photo retouching.  Its old school and fascinating for it.

There is a photograph of Mohammed Ali arriving in London with crop marks to just use his face, another of James Dean with legs painted in and one of John Lennon with just enough of Yoko painted out to make a square frame of his face.  The brush work is hurried and surprisingly basic.  These are pieces of work produced to illustrate a news story not pieces of art intended to be hung in a gallery.

If you’re interested in how things were done before digital stormed the world this exhibition is worth a visit.   It’s a perfect for a bite sized visit for lunch if you work in the city centre or an excellent aperitif for its larger neighbours if you’re coming from further afield.

A Vue 9.5 Infinite, CityEngine and SkinVue 9 Experiment

Click the Image to see Full Sized Version

Every time I hear someone talking about the latest Super Injunction I can’t help but think it sounds like one of the lesser known super hero comics.  Someone who comic fans love but the rest of us will only discover when they get a movie.

No one really knows who Super Injunction is except that he’s wealthy and has the power of (legal) invisibility.  Even in a picture like this one where he’s posing he ends up blurry and indistinct.  One of his biggest advantages is that his work clothes are also his costume.  No needing to find a phone box or worrying if the belly he’s started to get from too many good lunches at Michelin Stared restaurants will look embarrassing in the spandex.  Here he is pictured with Libel Woman another super hero who can be a bit grey and misused.

There is a slightly serious, practical side to this render.  I wanted to try out Vue 9.5 Infinite’s new  fast hybrid depth of field  2.5D algorithm in anger. I’ve not managed to get good results with the old depth of field methods but this new one seems to work really well and is fast enough for me on my 32 bit system.

The picture features Daz’s Victoria 4 and Michael 4 with textures enhanced using SkinVue 9, BC RoofTopper for the close up scenery and a CityEngine Wizard city modeled background.

So this is my first proper Vue 9.5 render post. A single cloud layer over an infinite procedural terrain with two texture layers controlled by altitude and slope angle. I sometimes feel I’m cheating a bit when I post one of these because Vue does so much of the work while letting me get on with the big picture.  Not really using any Vue 9.5 feature like the new cloud manipulation yet but still nice to see a new version can do the basics.

Dark Dwarf posted quite a few pictures of HMS Liverpool on her last visit to the city on his blog:

• The Leaving of HMS Liverpool
• HMS Liverpool

I just thought I’d post one of the ones I took last Sunday morning too.

I’ve tried to create a picture like this for some time – a cityscape with layers of different types of building like real cities have. I started this attempt earlier today and I think its my best attempt to date. Its built up of several CityEngine created models and a few from Cornucopia 3D. The foreground is the new Favela Houses at Cornucopia 3D along with some basic Vue plants. The mid ground is buildings created using the CityEngine Paris 2010 project. Behind that is a narrow row of CityEngine’s science fiction WizardCity and the tallest towers are from the modern city project.

I’d like to have included some cars and people in the foreground and possibly a plane in the sky but my 32 bit system couldn’t really cope with anymore models in the scene once I assembled it in Vue 9.

It’s bitingly cold again today so I decided to post another picture I took last week when Liverpool was foggy and covered in frost. This one is of the thick frost on a section of the chain fences at the Albert Dock.

Last night I started messing around with a picture I was messing around with in Vue 7. I was never 100% happy with the lighting of the original. The monster was too visible – I wanted it to be lurking and menacing. Now Vue 9 has the wonderful new relighting feature so I made a small render of the scene and then saved out 21 variations. I varied the lighting seven different levels of intensity. I also varied the sunlights colour to a blue and a green hue from the white it was in the original. To illustrate the effect here is a quick contact sheet I knocked up.

These two are late additions suggested by @WastexGames…

Sea Monster Variations Orange

Sea Monster Variationsv - Red

I’m torn over which one to go with so here is a quick poll that will run till Sunday night to see what you think (or leave a comment if you’d prefer) – you can pick more than one picture if you like several.

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On my visit to London on the way to Dragonmeet I went into the British Museum to have a look at the Great Court Roof. The roof was designed by Foster and Partners its an iconic piece of recent architecture. This picture is of part of it around an hour before sunset catching the low, late November sun. Since I wanted to get to my hotel before it got too late and I’d already spent too long in both the The Cartoon Museum and The Wellcome Trust exhibition I didn’t have time to really look at anything else in the museum. Still thats something I can correct another time.

Duke Street Derelict Building

This Wordless Wednesday’s a day late because of the Burke and Hare post.

Most of the pictures I post on my blog of Liverpool are of interesting buildings that are reasonably well looked after.  Having lived here for nearly twenty years I’ve seen a lot of miss-representation of the city in the national media.  I’ve heard comedians tell jokes this year that were about Liverpool before I arrived.    Its like a film crew that came to Liverpool and hunted down a street that’s about to be demolished or  the one who filmed the streets on bin day in one of the few streets that doesn’t have wheelie bins so they could shoot all the bin bags on the street.

I’ve watched Liverpool rebuild itself and restore its architectural heritage.  I don’t want to focus on the derelict and run down buildings any city has.  However some broken down buildings are interesting (and not just the Rotating Yates’s Wine Lodge).

They can have texture and character that other buildings have yet to gain. Water running off architectural details can create interesting patterns. Materials can age in intriguing ways.  Along with the photos I usually post I often snap side streets, alleys, buildings under construction, boarded up buildings and derelict shells.  I’ll live with the funny looks and one time someone complaining about “damn tourists”.

This building on Duke Street shows several layers of its construction, like an actor removing his face paint.

The 19th Century Church of Saint Andrew on Rodney Street is known locally as the Scotch church. It was a Presbyterian church built to serve the Scottish community of Liverpool. The church was closed in 1975 and is in an extremely poor state. In the small graveyard is a rather unusual grave in the form of a Pyramid built for William Mackenzie.  The first mystery is about his surname which is sometimes spelt  MacKenzie and McKenzie depending on who is writing about him.  I’ve gone for the name in the title of the transcription of his diaries.

A much repeated myth has sprung up surrounding Mackenzie that claims he was a gambler who was buried sitting upright in the tomb holding a winning hand of cards to cheat the devil to whom he’d promised his soul for a winning hand in a game. This appears alongside many pictures of his unusual tomb. I can’t really claim the moral high ground as I’ve played with it in an unfinished story.  However I am really intrigued as to why he really had a pyramid-shaped tomb.  I’ve done some research (ok I’ve done a bit of Googling).

Born in 1794 Mackenzie was the eldest of eleven children born in Lancashire to Alexander Mackenzie a Scottish contractor and Mary née Roberts. Apprenticed as a weaver in 1811 he switched to become a pupil of a lock carpenter on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal then later the dry dock at Troon harbour, on Craigellachie Bridge and as an agent on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal.  Later he worked under Thomas Telford and then returning to contracting on railway and canal civil engineering in Britain.  His work included the rail tunnel between Edge Hill and Lime Street Station.

From 1840 an invitation to tender for the Paris to Rouen railway by Joseph Locke led to his association with Thomas Brassey. After that he worked on railway engineering in France, Spain, the Italian state, Belgium, England, Wales and Scotland.  His investments included ironworks in Wales and France, housing in Liverpool and estates in Scotland. He had offices in Paris and Liverpool.  He was married twice and had no children.  When he died in 1851 his £341,848 estate mostly went to his youngest brother.

So far the closest I’ve placed him to a pyramid is Rome which has its famous pyramid.  This doesn’t explain his pyramid tomb which is of a very specific style.  The Diary of William Mackenzie (Thomas Telford Publishing in 2000) is a full transcription of Mackenzie’s diaries.  So my next step is to borrow it from the Liverpool Library to see if it sheds any light on the mystery.