Hello to all dear people at #Hive!... Generally and throughout my more than half a century of existence (52 years to be exact) I have not been someone who has been particularly adept at Christmas festivities. But this year I'm making more of an effort to have a good time this season, so one evening this past week I went down to the town's central square to see the lights and decorations put up by the mayor's office. There was also some music and children playing and walking around with their parents...

Obviously I wore my camera around my neck (I hardly ever go out without it these days)... Actually the lights looked nice and the figures and the Christmas tree were beautifully illuminated in the central square. There was also the name of the town "Montalban" in illuminated letters. It seems that the municipal office made a laudable effort to brighten up this part of town, even in spite of the severe economic crisis that affects us.

I took some "normal photos" of the place, but in reality there were very few. A few minutes after being there I got carried away by "my creative delusions" and was taking pictures of the little out-of-focus lights and thinking about what it would be like to transform them and turn them into my abstract visions... And that's how it all happened!...

So I was there literally "riding on top" of the illuminated figures taking pictures using a small (and bright) 35mm lens in manual focus mode and at wide apertures (usually f/2 or f/2.5) so I was sure to get a lot of out-of-focus lights of different colours, which I used to make these digital transformations shared with you today.

I was working on five base photos and chose to make two transformed versions of each of them. This took me about four hours sitting in front of my PC in a very relaxed way. Doing this kind of digital image alteration work is really an excellent kind of "catharsis"...👽

ORIGINAL UNTRANSFORMED BASE PHOTOS

I & II	III & IV	V & VI	VII & VIII	IX & X

SOMETHING ABOUT THE TRANSFORMATION PROCESS

I start to do this by starting from RAW photos and editing the image so that it looks like it is for a regular colour photograph...

I usually use Adobe Camera RAW and then I export the image in JPG format to work on it in Photoshop at my own pleasure...

Depending on what I think the image is good to do, I "prepare" it using various adjustment tools ranging from level grading to various filters for more serious transformations.

The range of possibilities is very wide and I often use blending brushes, shadows, stretching, lens distortions, highlights, blurs and even image overlays. Everything is valid in order to exercise my creativity and transform the original image into something as close as possible to what I have in mind.

My methodology for doing this kind of work is quite "anarchic". I can even use lighter editors (like PhotoScape for example) to make adjustments quickly and take advantage of some fairly simple filters they provide. They are also good editors to quickly add frames, rotate, straighten, watermark and vignette... So I have "nothing written" about my methodology... I just "go with the flow and use what I have at hand" (And that's a sweetly charming thing!) 😊

This has been a brief glimpse of the editing done for the transformed photos I and II.

CONVENTIONAL PHOTOS IN THE TOWN SQUARE AT CHRISTMAS TIME

I	II	II

_{ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.}

Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!