Are you awake? Do you hear the rain?
How rushingly it strikes upon the ground,
And on the roof, and the wet window-panel
Sometimes I think it is a comfortable sound,
Making us feel how safe and snug we are:
Closing us off in this dark, away from the dark outside.
The rest of the world seems dim tonight, mysterious and far.
Oh, there is no world left Only darkness, darkness stretching wide
And full of the blind rain’s immeasurable fall!
How nothing must we seem unto this ancient thing!
How nothing unto the earth—and we so small!
Oh, wake, wake!—do you not feel my hands cling?
One day it will be raining as it rains tonight; the same wind blow—
Raining and blowing on this house wherein we lie: but you and I—
We shall not hear, we shall not ever know.
O love, I had forgot that we must die.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Hear more of me, or hire my voice

The cold earth slept below,
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around, with a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow,
The breath of night like death did flow
Beneath the sinking moon.

The wintry hedge was black,
The green grass was not seen,
The birds did rest on the bare thorn’s breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track,
Had bound their folds o’er many a crack
Which the frost had made between.

Thine eyes glowed in the glare
Of the moon’s dying light;
As a fen-fire’s beam on a sluggish stream
Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there,
And it yellowed the strings of thy raven hair,
That shook in the wind of night.

The moon made thy lips pale, beloved—
The wind made thy bosom chill—
The night did shed on thy dear head
Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie
Where the bitter breath of the naked sky
Might visit thee at will.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Hear more of me, or hire my voice

Found this church while hanging out with a friend while heading to Jean-Talon market in Montreal.

This is another entry in Carmi Levy’s Thematic Photographic: Buildings. Here’s how it works.

Waiting for jasonmayoff.com to propogate through the internets so that it points here.

.

…

… still waiting, internets.  Where are you?

.

.

I’ll check again later.

I needed to write some fiction the other day.  It’s bad, it’s heavily unedited and it’s unfinished.  You don’t want to read any further.  This is your last warning.

Not dead by Jason Mayoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

Not Dead

By Jason Mayoff

He dragged the last body into room 14c, the room closest to the front desk.  Over the last 13 days, since he’d recovered from the blackout, he’d been pulling bodies from all over the neighbourhood into the abandoned motel.  He’d known it was freshly emptied for renovations because he drove by it every day on the way to work.

Make that, he used to drive by it every day on the way to work.  There was no work anymore.  There wasn’t much of anything.  There was existence and scavenging.  There was finding shelter, but there wasn’t much of anything else that made a life, a life.

» Read more: Not Dead

There were a lot of steps to get from the “before” to the “after” but they all just seemed flow, one from the other.  I really didn’t have to think about it and rack my brain the way I did on the previous picture (the sewing machine.)

I created this picture as I was thinking about personal style and what it meant and how I would develop one.  I’d been thinking that since I love working in Photoshop, that my “style” should be less of what happens in the camera and more what happens on the computer.  Not sure how that will play out over the months and years to come, but that’s how I feel now. 

Read more to see how I did it…

• As always, convert image to LAB color and sharpen only the Lightness layer using Unsharp Mask.  Then return to RGB color mode. (PS action here)
• One Color Balance adjustment layer for the highlights with the settings: -33, -77, -75 acting solely on the main image (you’ll see why later)
• One Color Balance adjustment layer for the shadows with the settings: -2, -46, -77 acting solely on the main image (you’ll see why later)
• The sky was washed out, so I used another photo of a sky taken on the same day at about the same time and inserted it in this picture. I did that by
  • doing a color range selection on the old sky so that all of it was selected (even between the tree branches.)  There was a lot of stuff below the sky that was selected too, but I unselected it all by holding down the alt-key and dragging the selection tool over the parts I didn’t want selected.
  • I copied the new sky into a layer which I placed behind the main layer.  I had to convert the Background layer into a “normal” layer to do this, since you can’t put anything under a Background layer.
  • I then had to give the sky similar tones to the rest of the image, but because it wasn’t exactly the same as the rest, I couldn’t have the main Color Balance layers affect it.. so, 
  • I opted for a hue/saturation layer for the sky with settings: -147, -79, 0 acting only on the sky.
  • I then needed to decrease brightness and increase contrast on the sky with a Levels adjustment layer with settings: 162, 0.62, 255.
• Now my sky and main portion of the image had similar tones, but I wanted to add a little grittiness to it.  I did that by adding some noise (sorry, I lost the exact noise settings, but I think it was Gaussian, monochromatic and under 20%.)
• I added a texture (thanks pareeerica) for a little more grit.  Blend mode Overlay and Opacity 44%.
• Now, the frame.  I used a brush from this collection.  I used white paint. It was brush #12 and I  enlarged and rotated as I needed for the sides and top.  I believe I painted (clicked) twice to get a whiter edge.
• Then I added my sig and voila.  The final product.

View final product on Flickr.
Sorry, no BUY link.  If you really want to buy this one, ask me and I’ll post it to Imagekind.