Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

About 2 weeks ago, I took a tour of Opus 40, an outdoor sculpture area, where the owner of the property, Harvey Fite, a professor of sculpture at Bard College, had both sculptures and the surrounding arching paths and narrow corridors over the course of 37 years using basic hand tools. The area had been a bluestone quarry. He also built the Quarryman's Museum which contains a collection of tools and other artifacts from that era. He started the work in 1938 and the work ended when he died in 1976, 3 years shy of his original 40-year estimate on how long it would take.

The museum had all sorts of things including various hand tools, saws, pitchforks, an anvil, chains, assorted glasswork, and more. To get an "old time" sort of feel to it, I used a sepia filter in Lightroom to turn a few of the photos into "wild west" looking black and white photos. One of the pictures had some glass jars, the wooden workbench and wall, and a window looking out into the woods. All of that looked good or normal in black and white or in color. But there were 3 glass objects on the window sill that stood out in the color picture. These were objects I had seen on the NY-17 route across NYS on the top of short telephone poles with broken wires hanging down from them, situated next to a railroad track. It was the remnants of a a telegraph line and those were the glass insulators (Hemmingway Insulators, to be precise…and possibly accurate).

Seeing how the bright teal/aqua blue glass stood out in the color picture, I thought it'd be cool to highlight that. I've seen various pictures where one element is in color while the rest was monochrome. I figured I'd try that gimmick this time. I guess I've been using Photoshop enough that I didn't have to look up how to do it. I saved 2 versions of the picture: sepia and color, and loaded them into two different layers. The color layer had a mask associated with it, so all I had to do was paint the part of the mask that had the insulators to allow the top (color) layer to show through. That meant I just painted over the things I wanted to be in color, and like magic, they became color. It was remarkably easy.

I think it looks cool, but it does feel like an overused trick. A bigger version of the picture is here.