Around Town

I went grocery shopping today and took some shots on my way down and back. I used some of my new treasure trove of Photoshop actions to create a nice retro look to the shots that passed quality control. These first two of downtown Shippensburg use a retro technique that produces the look of a washed-out old postcard; I added some grain to add to the aged look.

This next shot is of two ancient gravestones on the site of Shippensburg's original Lutheran/German Evangelical church. I've been especially attracted to these because of the way they lean together, and I finally got around to getting shots of them this past weekend. Unfortunately, they didn't work very well; I very much wanted to get this in black and white, but in one case there was just too much obvious house face in the background (and I was trying to get a fairly clean, uncluttered shot), and in another the hue values of one of the stones and the grass background were too close, and in b&w the stone got lost in the background. So today I shot the scene from a different angle, making the houses in the background less obvious and finding more contrast with the stones. I used the Holga action on it (and got rid of the annoying white margins this time) and got just what I was after. Ah, the sweet smell of success!

And finally, here's the Comcast building down on Baltimore Rd. next to the Giant where I do my grocery shopping. I wanted this because of that perfect "futuristic" look so popular in the middle of the 20th Century. This was deliberately retro architecture on their part; the building is only several years old and this look came into vogue and went out again half a century ago. They just missed authenticity, though; an authentic futurist look would have made a curve of that foreground corner. In any case, I used that retro postcard action of the top two photos, but left out the grain to keep it nice and smooth. Now all it needs is the Jetsons to pull up in front in their aircar.

© 2012 by A. Roy Hilbinger