we do a lot of work here at the visual mercenary group and many times it’s of a corporate nature. we really don’t mind, because we try to put creativity into everything we do. actually this past year we’ve been pretty busy but haven’t put up any of our new work on our online portfolio, nor have we written any blurbs about the project here on our blog. so i’m setting myself the task of writing a post a week on our past projects before, as we all know, the speed of the internet makes them defunct. there are already a couple of promotional micro sites we’ve done that are offline. but i digress…

ferndance

there are times that some of our projects are of a purely creative nature. through our association with the wesport academy of dance - whose website & blog we’ve designed and programmed - we have been introduced to many individuals and groups in the dance world. one of them is ferndance run by choreographer david fernandez. last month we put our two newly purchased sony ex1-r hd cameras (yes our credit card company was thrilled that day) to good use by shooting a short promo piece for david at the rehearsal studio at the mark morris center in brooklyn. we’re editing the video and will post it soon, but i just needed something to write about and thought i’d tease you with a couple of photos.now i know you’ll come back because you really should see these beautiful and talented ladies dance.

ferndance

three days ago they cut down a very old tree from our deceased next door neighbor’s front yard. the tree was over 120 feet tall and old. gina and sophia counted 89 rings on the stump that remained. i witnessed most of the cutting and it was pretty sad as there was nothing wrong with the tree. the irony of the situation was that the tree needed to be cut so that an oil spill could be cleaned up. the fifty year old oil tank that was under the tree had been leaking for many years and had contaminated a deep and wide area of the ground by the front yard of the house.

ruth's tree as it stood after 90 years

initially they had called a tree cutter from PA who was a total maniac. he just climb up the tree and started cutting huge branches and dropping them right onto the street. there was no way we were going to let him cut down the upper branches as they were over our house. we quickly put an end to his day or he would’ve really made a mess.

the crazy pennsylvanian

note the branch about to hit the ground. each branch probably weighed 500 lbs.

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a while back i wrote a post about tilt shift photography and how easy it was to create the tilt shift look in photoshop by simply using a couple of filters and masks. of course you can go out and buy a tilt shift lens and every photo can have that look, but they are kind of expensive. since a few friends asked me to show them, i’ll outline the technique right here.

step 1: choose the right photograph
even though you can do this to every photo, not all photographs work the same way. find a photo that you can isolate a specific object in the foreground or middle ground. this will greatly accentuate the effect. i chose a shot i took in athens of the temple of hephaestus from the areopagus.

temple of hephaestus

step 2: duplicate the background: self explanatory

tilt shift 2

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