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For those of you who may be interested in the source materials for my HNT photochops, I have created this page. Please feel free to comment or ask questions about the individual projects, if you like. I would be more than happy to do a write up on how I put these images together.

Secret Underground HNT

For this HNT photo, I combined three images.  One I found on Photo Stock Exchange.  The other two images were taken by me, during a time of day when I could get the afternoon sunlight behind me.  This helped to match the lighting for the background image of the steel corridor.

Super HNT This week's HNT is highly inspired by the release of Superman Returns. Superman is by and far my all time favorite superhero, followed very closely by Spider-Man. Not too close, though. We got to follow the two-foot rule there. Anyway, Here's my source material for this week's HNT picture. NOt much to say about it. Those viewers who are familiar with my past work will probably recognize the source image of me from my Thanksgiving HNT and The Human Half-Nekkid Torch.

If anyone is interested in getting their own version of the Superman image, you can download it from the Superman Returns web site

HNT Bawls For this photochop I used a total of three images, as shown below. The photo of me in my back yard, the photo of the bottle of Bawls, and the beach scene which I found on Stock.Xchange. In case you're wondering the photo of the bottle of Bawls is taken against a partially nuetral background for a reason. Ideally, I should have made it completely neutral, but I wasn't thinking very well that day. The neutral background, if done correctly, makes it extremely easy to separate the important elements of the photo (in this case, the bottle) and transplant it into a different image altogether. This is the same exact process used by the motion picture industry when they use "blue screen" or "green screen". The blue or green backgrounds provide an easy means to separate the important parts of the imagery and substitute it for other elements, such as a starfield or a completely different locale, etc. I only used a white sheet of paper to create this nuetral background. I should have used more of it so I could completely remove all background elements and create a more realistic effect. Another interesting piece of trivia is the number of actual photos I snapped of the bottle. I wanted to make sure I got the angle of the shadow correct compared to the shadows in the image of the beach. I never really matched it 100%, so I had to do some mesh warping in my photo editor to tweak it. And for some reason, the image of the beach won't upload right now, so I'll put it in later.

Tiny HNT For the image of me as a tiny man serving toast to my sons, I used two wholly original images that I took myself. These images were taken at two completely different times of the day. The image of my sons staring at the bread was taken on a Saturday, during the daytime, with sunlight pouring in from the right side of the image. The second image, that of me heaving the "bread" (our kitchen table), was actually taken at night. Thus the setup of the second image required some lighting effects to help offset the fact that there was no light coming in from the right. What I ended up doing to avoid having to try and manipulate the image was set up a very bright halogen worklamp outside of the door to the backyard (behind me in the second image). This produced a very realistic "sunlight" effect, which then required that I only tweak the brightness, contrast, and saturation settings when I combined that image with the image of my two sons. Make sense? Good. In case you're wondering, the toothpick is holding the bread up in the appropriate position. I digitally removed it in the final product. HNT and the

Centaur For the centaur image, I used the following works. The horse was photographed by Kati Garner of Stanwood, WA and is posted as a royalty free image on Stock.xchange. You can view more of her work here. The other two photographs were taken by myself.