Before lockdown I took my phone on walks not to chat or check emails, but to photograph. Recently, just as Melbourne entered stage 4 lockdown, Adobe released a free app called photoshop camera. Complete with inbuilt artificial intelligence to detect skylines and adjust lighting and tones, I found myself taking photographs of less interesting subjects because the effects added to the photograph using the free downloadable creative lenses meant the photograph served as a foundation for a creative overlay served up by the lens. A bright day with colourful structures could be turned into a dystopian landscape before your very eyes… Anyway enough words, let the photographs and art tell the story of our walks revisited through the inner northern boundaries of Melbourne City. I will start with a little about the App.
...and yes the underlying photo of the temple in Melbourne is real... on the banks of the Maribyrnong River in Footscray.
We often take walks around the Kensington area. Our 5km radius extends to the extremities of the city grid, but we don't stray further than Victoria Markets, Costco or Moonee Ponds and the Maribyrnong River.
This is a photogrid of original photographs and their instant PhotoShop Camera lens applications to them. Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.
Travelling on the CityLink motorway from the airport into the city, you will pass under 39 large red poles and an enormous yellow pillar tilted over the traffic below.
The 70-metre yellow steel beam and the accompanying 39 red "sticks", frame the freeway's city exit in Flemington are officially called the Melbourne International Gateway. The yellow pillars represents the Victorian Gold-Rush and the red poles represents the Wheat Industry of Australia.
I have used some lenses in PhotoShop Camera and in some cases no lens to have some fun on an exercise walk with my son, Joe.
Here we start with an original photograph, taken from the Moonee Ponds aqueduct looking south to the city.
Here I added a rainbow (which you can resize and move. As you will see, many of these effects determine where the sky is and objects are perfectly placed in the background. This lens is called "Tempest" and like all others is free.
No special effects here... just a yellow ball we were carrying for exercise used to create a letter i on its side.
Another original photograph before I got to it with the dystopian lenses again from the Tempest collection.
With Stage IV lockdown due to the pandemic, despite it being a warm cheerful day - I felt like applying an effect which reflected maybe some feelings from people in the city and also some folks looking in from the outside.
An even darker adjustment to the Gateway to Melbourne.
Enough doom and gloom - Artful 3 lens applied here.
From the same Artful 3 collection of lenses. Worth hanging on the wall.
These photographs were taken with an iPhone 8 however the app is available for Android as well.
My workflow is simply to load the photoshop camera app as I take my walk and pick a lens – artistic, neon, futuristic or fantasy skies – there are so many to choose from and more are being added every week. One lens can have many looks which you can apply to your photographs and you can also import photographs from your camera roll and add lens effects from photoshop camera after the photograph is taken.
Sharing can be to any of your normal social media suspects and also to places like onedrive or in my case LightRoom – the Mobile version, not the classic version. Just on LightRoom, if you haven’t tried the inbuilt tutorials which cover how a particular photo was enhanced and usually takes less than 5 minutes, then check them out. It is especially good for the budding photographer.
Of course you can share a number of photographs as an album, either through LightRoom or by uploading to a photo publishing service like smugmug, but if you would like to create a story that lasts longer than a doom scrolling flash on someone’s ad filled feed – then you might want to curate words in with your video and pictures to create a picture story or multimedia portrait of the experience and discoveries.
On the specifics of PhotoShop Camera’s lenses – with some of the objects be they planets, icecreams or large chickens which are added as props to your photograph – you can in many cases use your fingers to pinch, spread or rotate the items so they fit just right in your shot as I did with the rainbow in the shot above.
For those who would like to know roughly where the photos were taken. I have included a 3 and 5 km radius from our home and some of the more familiar object locations in photos.