Les Photos Surréalistes de ChRon

[N O M A D]

"Les Photos Surréalistes de ChRon" translated from French means "The surreal photos of Chron"


Surreal defined by Merriam-Webster means " marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream; unbelievable." After taking and editing heaps of photos on my iPhone and shooting even more with my 35mm Nikon F3 & Olympus XA2, I've come to the realization that the photos I aim to shoot for and the look I tend to go for, to me, looks surreal. I like my photos to look old and aged like they've been sitting around for decades. I also love photos that give a different take on reality or from a different vantage point from the norm. I sum this general idea I have for my direction in iPhoneography as "surreal." In this thread I'll give you a peek inside of my mind, my editing process, and my take on life as I see it everyday. I appreciate any and all feedback, likes, views, replies, and comments. I hope you enjoy my work and my journey to come up with a cohesive body of iPhoneography work that I can call mine.





So that I don't have to keep posting my workflow, this is my breakdown of apps that I process with:

Always = Camera+, ScratchCam, Snapseed

Sometimes = Filterstorm, PhotoForge2, Camera Awesome!, Cameramatic,

"Depending On My Mood" = Decim8, Big Lens, AnalogColor, PhotoToaster, MagicHour, Super Retro, Dynamic Light, SimplyHDR

If I use anything new or am testing any apps I don't usually use, I'll indicate that. If you would like me to let you know what my workflow was on a certain photo, just ask (I make a note of the workflow on each of my apps).



Links:

Instagram

Flickr

Cowbird (coming soon)

 

[N O M A D]

Diving in with these:

my take on a sunny day

surreal streetphotography

surreal streetphotography, II

"stairway to ..."

"which would you rather?"

 

[lisamjw]

These are fabulous. I really like the second image!!

 

[RoseCat]

Beautiful set of photos!! Really love your processing style...

Agree with Lisa and l love #2 - great feel to it! And the stairs are really lovely... Your last one has great a POV (both literally & figuratively).

Sent from my iPhone using MobiTog

 

[N O M A D]

thank you very much for the likes and thank you for the feedback lisamjw and RoseCat. I think out of viewing tons of other photos and editing them i've developed this aged/grungy processing style and I enjoy processing my photos that way as well. i'm going to toy around with some HDR processing as well, but that's for another day and another thread.

i was unable to edit the first post, but i have a link now to my CowBird page that you can click on. if you don't know what CowBird is, its basically a photo sharing site, but with a twist. You have to add a story to each photo. The basis of the site is storytelling and I encourage everyone to request an invite. I dont have any stories posted yet, but I will soon. I just recieved my invite early this morning.

on to the main point of this thread. here goes some shots from my train ride home for Spring Break from college. i think train stations are a great place to shoot street photography and to sharpen your skills. there's always a nice POV or vantage point and tons of people around to add character to your shot and more to your story. i'm eager to seek out more places like it so I can work on my street iphoneography/photography even more. i'm not much of a street photographer in fear of people catching onto the fact that i'm photographing them, but i'm becoming more comfortable as I take more photos.

let's get down to business:

abnormally vivid train (surrealized)

note: decided to use Camera Genius instead of Camera+ to edit this app. Camera Genius' editor is pretty basic, but they had a nice filter they called "Pseudo HDR" that I used on this photo as my first step in processing.

"the surreal traveler ... his journey is unkown, but like you and I, he's just another passenger on this ride we call life."

surreal travelers (perspective 2)

 

[Venomator]

A superb idea for a project Jay and, so far, some awfully decent iMages to back it up...

Some of the mono surreal stuff is inspirational and it's a joy to wander through the thread, with your mini stories and wonder at your penchant for adding interest to your work...

 

[RoseCat]

Love all the train shots!! Love your story lines....

 

[lisamjw]

Love the trains and the photo sharing site. Had not heard of that one and I like the twist to it.

 

[N O M A D]

once again, thank you all for the feedback. this project has been a joy to shoot for and process. by now I definitely have the look down that I want the world to see and my processing reflects that.

unfortunately, this past week I was ill and wasn't able to make many photos at all. sickness hit me the day I got home from college, and that kept me in bed all week. I am now however feeling better and have returned to college to continue my studies.

I did however take advantage of my travel day and shot tons of photos, with the Hipstamatic app being my camera of choice. usually i'm not the biggest Hipsta user out there and I just use Hipsta to do challenges or maybe as an "off-app" when i'm not shooting with Camera+ or Mattebox, but whilst sick in bed i started to play around with my favorites and look to some blogs for combinations. I came across an article by Dan "Konstructivist" Cristea sharing his Hipsta combos and I fell in love with them and toyed with them on my travel day, and even came up with my own surreal combo. My favorite film thus far is definitely US1776. It's a grainy and contrasty B&W film that plays off the light wherever you choose to shoot it. Sometimes the images come up too light, but I find when I double tap focus and gather my composition just right, exactly what I want the world to view comes out. I also love the Salvador 84 lens. It's behavior is strange. It will either mirror or blend, depending on whatever it feels like doing and I love that. I'll shoot my subject a few times and see how it behaves on each shot.

While using Hipstamatic, my composition greatly improved. Since your letting the camera work for you in shooting and development, there's little room to tweak besides the films, lenses, flashes, and high/med/low quality adjustments. So for you to get the shot you want, composition is the focus. getting your subject wherever in the frame you want, picking the right vantage point, checking the background to see if you can get some of it to play into your story, waiting for different elements of the story to come into the picture like animals, people, the wind, the sun, light, etc. all of these things play a key role for me in shooting the hipstamatic shot I want. since there isn't a grid on Hipstamatic it's also very important for me to line up my subject as I'd like to see my end image result. I don't imagine the grid, which may work for some, but I image my end result and where I see what in my artistic vision.

Like I heard Richard "Koci" Hernandez say, it's all about following that muse you have. That creative thing in the back of everyone's mind that sparks the photos we take and why.


now on to my "hipsturrealism" show:

"angles are watching" (surreal vantage I)
John S + US1776

"angels are watching" (surreal vantage II)
John S. + US1776

"Gotham City Subway" (night train perspective)
Lucifer IV + Rock BW-11

"Gotham City Subway" (lone traveler perspective)
Lucifer IV + AO DLX

"Gotham City Subway" (surrealized)
Salvador 84 + US1776

"Gotham City Symmetry" (surreal vantage A)
Salvador 84 + US1776

"Gotham City Symmetry" (surreal vantage B)
Salvador 84 + US1776

"reflections of passing travelers" (surrealized)
Salvador 84 + US1776

"lightspeed" (surreal window perspective)
Salvador 84 + US1776

"expresso macchiato skies"
Tejas + Cano Cafenol

 

[N O M A D]

should have been the first, but definitely not forgotten photo in this "hipsturrealism" show. the one photo I managed to take while trapped in my own household sick:

"glass reflections from across the way"
Salvador 84 + Claunch 72 Monochrome

 

[RoseCat]

Fantastic photos!!! Thank you for sharing your thoughts/processes. Really love this thread!

 

[lisamjw]

Love all of these!!! And, thank you for sharing your thoughts on Hipstamatic! I agree with you completely.

 

[N O M A D]

thank you RoseCat and lisamjw for your kind words. I enjoy sharing my thought process on taking photos and appstacking them. I find that sharing this information with likeminded individuals generates more feedback and more insight on what you can improve on or refine.

college work has been keeping me busy, so I haven't been shooting too much with my iPhone. since I take Photography class, most of my photos have been taken on my Nikon F3 35mm SLR. also developing my prints in the darkroom has been pretty time consuming, but it's also fun and some of the same principles I use in the darkroom carry over to my appstacking and iPhoneography.

I don't have too much insight on my processing this go round. I've been using my normal apps and also experimenting with some other apps like Grungetastic, Dramatic B&W, A-HDR, and Image Blender. There hasn't been much out in the app world that has interested me in terms of adding to my arsenal of editors. if anyone has any suggestions please let me know, but for now, I've been sticking to my normal routine of apps (snapseed, camera+, scratchcam, simply B&W).

I am going to use Streetmate more though. I think that Streetmate is for me the closest thing to what I do with my 35mm Photography and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Before it went on sale I had to use someone else's account to utilize it because I wasn't ready to shell out the $1.99 for it in the App Store and I had contacted the dev when I was ready to make the plunge and he said it was going on sale soon, but that Apple was taking a long time to put it through. Just goes to show how slow the App Store system is for lesser known apps. He also said it was taking long to put out his updates as well. Nonetheless, now that it's 99 cents I urge everyone to try it and experiment with it. I love my results and they just totally and completely correlate with my darkroom prints. No frills, raw B&W shooting.


without further ado, here's the continuation of the surreal show:

busy train station (surrealized)

lost in a sea of surrealism (abstract)
(utilized Jordi V. Pou's Kokovoko Tutorial on this photo. this was a reflection from a car window into it's passenger side mirror, so I masked around & underneath the mirror to get even tones. there wasn't much clarity with the base to begin with, which is why I decide to surrealize this photo in an abstract manner.)

surreal drunk driving fire rescue
(utilized Streetmate as a base for this photo and I love the way it came out. I ran it through Scratchcam about 3x and like the results alot. I think this is my best surreal edit yet out of the lot.)

 

[lisamjw]

I'm impressed with all three but am especially drawn to the first one, in part, because of the featured couple. To me, that photo tells a story.