A Real Haunted House

You can see the old farm house from the highway. Every window has been smashed and panels on the front door have been kicked in. It looks brutalized by time and people and years of neglect.

Seeing this house, I get the same feeling that overtakes me when I look at cars in a wrecking yard. Once they were brand new. Once someone drove each one of them off the lot...maybe on a hot summer afternoon with great tunes playing on the radio. Now they're here, ready to be crushed and melted and re-made into something else.

This house isn't ever going to be re-made. But people used to live here. They laughed and worked and died inside its tiny little rooms and one day they left it behind for the squatters and the hobos and the mice. And one by one the people left. Now only the mice remain.


My wife, Sheree, and three of my grandchildren have stopped here to have a look. We're at the tail end of a small camping adventure in Em Te Town -- a western theme resort/campground. Em Te Town was built by someone who had a great passion for the 1800's. It was a "someone" who had a great vision -- but the town still felt "put together." Interesting to look at, but contrived.

This house, this deserted and forgotten gem, is the real deal.

The kids pour out of the car and start walking around the house, asking us excited questions and pointing out amazing things to each other.


My wife is smiling. She sees me looking at her and says "We played in houses like this all the time when I was a kid. Magical..."

She smiles as she remembers. And we both smile as we watch our grandchildren explore the exterior.

I am feeling oddly emotional and I can't explain why. It's just an old house. But there is something so very sad about the fact that it is rotting and forgotten and broken. A house without people looks lonely and very old.

"Go in," says my wife to the kids. "I know you're dying to go exploring. Be careful. Watch out for nails and don't touch anything. I give you permission to go."

There's a smile in her voice and a note of excitement. The formal statement she's just made is intended to release them...to invite them to have a guiltless adventure. She knows well what the kids are feeling. She wants to pass onto them her traveler's heart. She wants them to feel the breathless touch of pure adventure that makes their hearts beat faster and their breath quicken. And this touches me too.

In my life I have driven by thousands of these houses without a single thought. Again, I reflect, I am looking at one tiny part of the world only because my wife has stopped to look at it.

As I work my bulk though a kicked in panel of the front door, I really feel like I am going back in time.


Before me is a wood stove with a farming manual open on top of it. The floor is littered with bird droppings and the musty mysterious scents that fill a place after many lonely years.


Coats and hats hang on hooks. (Sheree took an utterly amazing picture of this. You can see it in her post http://blog.picajet.com/2008/08/22/our-disappearing-heritage-along-western-canada-roadways/ Have a look at it and tell me National Geographic shouldn't publish it!) Shoes lie forgotten on the floor. There's a mattress in each room and the whole place is littered with droppings and stuffing and time-scarred clothing.

Inside one tiny room is a Bible tract with a quote from the Sermon on the Mount. My imagination goes into overdrive here. Did some hobo pass a few weeks here, reading this stuff? Who was he? Who lived here in the first place? Where did they go?

I take a lot of pictures. And as I do so, I am feeling strangely grateful. I am grateful to the house, as absurd as that sounds. I am grateful to the people who built it as well as the current owners (whoever they are) who have not torn it down. I am grateful that I can use photography and Photoshop to give visual representation to whatever it is that causes that lump to form in my throat. I am also grateful to my wife, who once again has made me stop my mad headlong rush through life to show me an amazing but very quiet treasure.

The house is still there. Mice scrabble in the walls. The clothing and discarded magazines tell eloquent and compelling stories. There's magic oozing out of its bare wood and distant whispers of people long gone still crackle in the air. This is a house haunted by many voices...many lives and I am blessed to spend a few minutes here and make some pictures of what I see.

Try it for yourself. Stop at a house near you. Have a look. Don't touch anything. Look out for nails and have fun.

Lord of the Image: Building Magic Into Your Graphic

It's January in Edmonton. Freezing. Sheree and I are just recovering from the Christmas season, but we are getting onto a plane and going to New Zealand. We expect one of the highlights to be a tour we've booked that goes to some of the Lord of the Rings film sites.

But as the day grows closer, we start getting more and more unhappy with the prospect because each day off the ship (it was a 12 day trip into NZ and Australia) is precious and you hate to waste even a single moment on land.

So it was with considerably lower expectations that we got onto a bus in the early morning hour and headed off with other LOTR fans to see where Peter Jackson actually made his film magic.

Let me tell you just a little bit before we get to the meat of this blog. Tolkein opened my eyes to a whole new world. I first read The Hobbit in my teens and have been fascinated with things fantastical since then. Sheree and I have matching white gold wedding bands inscribed with elven script.

It's not a geek-like obsession. It's more in agreement with the beautiful notion that we are both on the same journey.We expect to go "there and back again" and it doesn't matter to us even a little bit that we are a Fellowship of Two.

But we didn't fancy being trapped in a bus all day. The tour guide, a fellow who had been an extra during the filming, warned us that we were going to be seeing where the film was shot, but that all the props were long gone.

Sheree and I traded looks and sighed.

I've never been so happy to be wrong.

It was one of the GTDOAT ("Great Travel Days of All Time") as we bounced around the NZ countryside and saw site after site, listening to stories of how the filming actually happened. It was a step beyond geek heaven.

The guide was passionate about his subject matter. He loved talking about the film and he loved Tolkein and on that bus it was perfectly alright to wonder aloud what the elven bread would have tasted like and for me to defend my stand that Samwise Gamgee is, in fact, one of fiction's great supporting characters of all time. We were among our kind of people. You get the picture, right?

There were moments when I really felt like magic was stirring and I could see the Galadriel giving Frodo a gentle kiss on the forehead as he set his jaw and marched off to Mount Doom. I could hear the rustle of elven garb as a silent procession moved through the woods to self-imposed exile from Middle Earth. I'm pretty sure I saw Sam peeking out at me just around the corner of my imagination as he set about preparing an evening meal. I felt again the breathless excitement of watching the Fellowship of the Ring set out on a quest of such grand scale that the fate of the world hung on its outcome...

Yup. I love that book. The subject matter makes my blood race. How do I convey that feeling to you -- who may or may not care about Middle Earth?

Let's start with an actual setting. The bridge in the picture at the top is one that LOTR movie fans probably won't recognize. It's on private land -- but when the filming was being done it was a vision of light and soft curves. But some very important scenes were filmed here.

I wanted to bring some sense of the magic to this photo -- which was after all -- your basic white bridge. I used a picture of Galadriel from a calendar I owned, scanned it, and built it into the graphic. (No. I didn't take the picture of Cate Blanchette...sigh) I kept the opacity very low so she just comes in on the border of the picture.


At one point the guide was reading a scene from the book where Legolas is interacting with Frodo. I happened to see my wife's face and really wanted to capture that expression. It's the look every book lover knows because it is imprinted on their soul the very instant they read something that delights their spirit.

Legolas (Orlando wasn't available for a sitting, either) is just barely on the fringe of the photo. I used an Overlay Blend so he becomes part of the background . (You'll find Blending Options at the top of the Layers Pallet. Overlay is one of many potentially wonderful effects.)

The site, and the graphic need to be visual depictions of what it felt like to be standing there, listening and being happily enveloped again in Tolkein's sweet spell.

It is, ultimately, a blending of ideas and images. It is a mix of both to create something new, as I try to convey to you what it feels like to read a book or touch magic...or have magic touch you.

So how can you share a few well-chosen steps of your journey with the world? What elements would figure in the graphic you would create? What colors would you use? What backgrounds? What would be the atmosphere of the image you build?

Think about Tolkein when you start the project. He had the same pen and paper that every other writer has had since cavemen were scraping rocks on walls. But he had a vision and it was his vision that far transcended the elements of pen and paper and became something utterly unique. Pen and paper were just the medium through which he fashioned his creation. Let me say it again: He transcended his chosen medium.

You can too.

You have a camera, an imagination and Photoshop.

Where do you want to take your viewer today?

Accenting with Color

I love the picture of this NYC cop about to tell someone off. The shot was taken at the St. Patrick's Day Parade last year. Sheree and I were up very early, staking out our places on the parade route...because no one knows how to throw parades like New Yorkers do.

I wanted the treatment of the cop to be in very sharp focus. I wanted the gaffing tape repair to his radio to be sharp. But the picture simply refused to pop until I allowed the only thing in color to be that "way out of focus flag" in the background.

You recognize it, of course. But the line from the cop's eye runs directly across the flag and off the image. That's what makes it one of my all-time favorite pictures.

To create this look is pretty basic. First you make a COPY of your color picture, you DESATURATE the top cop layer and use your Eraser Tool to remove the black and white flag, allowing the color flag on the layer beneath to shine through. Alternately, you can use a selection tool to select the flag and press DELETE.

If you are using CS3 to desaturate your photo, do it with IMAGE> ADJUSTMENTS> BLACK AND WHITE. This addition is one of the absolute best things about CS3. You can desaturate by individual color. It is a seriously way cool thing. Try to suppress the "ooooo" and "ahhhhh" reflex as you see what it does as you move those sliders around. I dare you.

Think about the techniques you can use this for. Remember all those sappy pictures with little kids dressed up like adults giving each other roses...and the only actual COLOR in the photo was the flower? They were very powerful visuals. Think about applying your little splash of color to an object you have put on a Dynamic Point on the Rule of Thirds. The very notion of all the possibilities of preselecting one color area amidst a sea of black and white makes my head hurt. (But it's a good hurt.)

Think about going beyond Black and White and making the picture sepia (IMAGE> ADJUSTMENTS> PHOTO FILTER) and introducing a splash of color to that image. You get it, right? The possibilities are endless.

What makes a picture stand out? It stands out because it's a visual someone relates to, right? Endless pictures of Uncle Ned making a big show of picking his nose each time someone turns the camera on him get pretty boring very quickly. Okay. They get boring immediately.

But how about a guy who has dyed his moustache green for St. Pat's Day? I like this picture too -- and there's very little Photoshop in it. It makes an interesting visual: the curve of his face, the curve of his moustache...the smile...but where do your eyes go? Uh huh. The moustache. Why? Because it's the only element of the picture that doesn't make sense.

Our eyes send the picture to our brain and our brain sends it back with the question: "Are you SURE it's green?" We keep looking and, sure enough, it is. Confirmation goes back to the brain and before we know it, we have the viewer engaged.

It's the visual juxtaposition that hooks the viewer.

Blending color and motion can have the same effect. The NYC Firefighters had a vision all their own. And I think this picture works as well. What is it a picture of? It's more than a bunch of guys waving flags. It's about pride and patriotism. It's about motion and color.


It's about the guy taking the picture of the people waving flags. It's about a whole bunch of stuff -- which ordinarily would be the kiss of death for a photo. ("Whole bunch of stuff" usually results in a "Picture that isn't of anything at all.") This one is about flags. It's about people. It's about people and flags. It's a line of red white and blue on top and a line of dark clothes beneath.

The common element in all three of these graphics is color that draws your eye to a specific part of the graphic. It's the color that draws the eye and insists where the eye looks. It's color that engages us.

We humans are drawn to color like moths are drawn to light. So use that reflex to make your graphics stronger.

Hello, Purist!

I have been playing around on Flickr...the photo display community, these past few days.

It seems to work like this: you post a picture. You go hunting for other pictures you like and tell the people who made them that you think they are wonderful. (If you'd like to tell me how wonderful I am, my "Photostream" is http://www.flickr.com/photos/41659872@N00/ but please remember that I am very sensitive and have been known to cry and sob for hours if someone hurts my feelings.) Then they come back, look at your stuff and tell you they think you're wonderful too.

It's okay, I suppose. But I have noticed that on a number of Flickr groups have "NO PHOTOSHOP" rules. These rules are written with the same passion you'd say "NO DEAD MAGGOTS OR ROTTING CORPSES."

There's actually a group called "Photoshop is not a dirty word." I was a little surprised at the vehemence some of these people have about not using Photoshop.

How come?

I think it goes back to a belief that, since Photoshop is digital editing software, the people who use it are second-rate photographers who take crappy pictures and try to make them better with Photoshop.

Hmmm.

In the first place: a crappy picture will (at best) be only marginally less crappy after you've slaved over it in Photoshop. The round man brandishing the two pickles up top (who I met at a Renaissance Faire in New York) is making a comparison. That's the way I see the Photoshop/Photography debate. It's entirely two different pickles.

They are related art forms -- but they are not the same. I happen to be married to a die-hard purist. She'll crop a picture. She'll even make some minor adjustments. But the pic you see is the pic she shot. (Speaking of photography, you'd do yourself a massive favor by reading her blog on the "Basics of Photography." Bar none -- it's the clearest instruction on what plays into taking a good picture http://blog.picajet.com/2008/08/11/digital-camera-lessons-they-are-free-online-just-google-them/)

I, on the other hand, usually look at the picture I am taking as the starting point of a Photoshop project. Of course I want the pic to be as excellent as possible. The better the original, the better the starting point for my project.

There are purists everywhere. There are even Photoshop purists who think that whatever effect you create MUST be done in Photoshop without the aid of plug-ins or third party filters. The idea is that if you don't know how to get the job done in Photoshop, you shouldn't be doing it.

I, on the other hand, think that the artist's concept for a visual piece is what really matters and who cares how he gets there? It takes as long to learn plug ins as it does to learn Photoshop in some cases. If you can get the exact effect you're looking for with a plug in -- I'm all for it.

"Garden Girl" -- the green woman above, is a white statue somewhere in New Zealand. The white was uninteresting. She's got a green gradiant now -- but still retains the stone look. Added shadows enhance the look. So does the brick wall...and the fact that the green on her was taken from the green plants behind her. ("Garden Girl." Get it?) I like touches like that.


I agree with the purists. It's no longer a photograph. It's an image of a photograph remade to suit the image I had in mind when I took it. It's now digital artwork.

This actor (the one with the goggles) was promoting a movie about a race between New York and Paris. Aside from being a wonderful concept, the picture just didn't work in color. It needed grain and it needed a single tone. It needed to look gritty. I don't know how it could work as well as a color or even a black and white piece.

I agree it takes skill to make a great photograph. Absolutely. It also takes skill to turn out a great digital image.

What's the purpose of visual communication anyway? We are all looking to communicate an idea or a feeling or a concept. We're all trying to make the viewer of every photograph or image feel something.

Here's a garbage can on Edmonton's Whyte Avenue. This is the "trendy area where there are also still a lot of street people."

I suspect one of them chose to put a different four letter word on top of a garbage can. I liked it. And while I was taken with the photograph, I was already thinking the image would be stronger if an element of "painterly" effect was added. The distortion is just enough to keep the image interesting.

So, hello Purists. It's nice to see you. I think you photographer types do some amazing work.

Now how about you all lighten up a little, okay? Take another look at the stuff graphic artists are doing and try to tell me there's not some wonderful art being generated. Or don't. Suit yourselves.

Signs, Doors and Windows...and an Old Car

As our trip to Vegas eases into that place where travel memories go when they start to lose their sharpness, I wanted to take a moment to talk about unusual picture opportunities that present themselves along the road.

The car to the left, for example. Remember the blog where I told you about the jolly guys who had the squirting mustard bottle? This car is out front of their restaurant.

Visually, I suppose it's interesting. But it's also a mish-mash of colors and...stuff. So what makes it work as a graphic for me?

I will often look at a picture of someone's creative work and start wondering about them. The creator, I mean. Take another look at the car. Someone went to a whole lot of trouble to make something that would make an impression on the viewer. Who did that? Why go to all that work and trouble?

How about this snowman? (I think it's a snowman...) From the highway it looks pretty charming because it's hanging out of an Airstream trailer. When you get closer, you can see that the elements and passersby haven't been kind.

Up close...it's kinda creepy.

Of course you have to walk off the highway, through a field where any number of snakes and/or scorpions could be lying in wait for the unwary, round little photographer who just has to get closer to his subject. (I picked up about six hair-thin spines of some kind of pointy plant matter in my foot. I am still trying to get the last one out...)

But look at it. We're talking a snowman hanging out of the window of a trailer in the middle of a desert. Yup. It was worth a picture. (I'm not so sure about the pointy things.) There is no reason for the trailer to be there. Who put it there? Why? (I half suspected it was placed there by the snakes and scorpions to trap unwary photographers...but maybe not.) And why did they stick a snowman in the window? Curiouser and curiouser.

Sometimes the fascination comes from a simple doorway. You will find this particular door about halfway between Kingman and Seligman.

The whole area around it has been crammed tight with artifacts, cars, signs, props, gas pumps and cattle skulls.

I had a small photographer's siezure as I very nearly drove by it. It's a place custom designed for photo hounds.

But look at the door. Click on it. Read what cowboys are supposed to do. Read the rest of the information and tell me that it was not created by someone oozing personality, and pouring that personality onto the door.


Sometimes the object of attention can be something that looks really old -- like this old sign for a Chinese restaurant. There was very little Photoshop done to this sign. The sky really was that blue and the sign really is that worn. I was blown away by the signs in The Boneyard because they make me wonder about the many thousands of people who have seen them, walked by them -- been lured in by them.

Signs speak loudly about place in which they have been found as well as the people who live there.

I am turning the corner of the Vegas trip now. My work has been busy and I am already looking forward to the last trip of the year to Houston, San Antonio and New Orleans.

But I've also noticed that each trip -- from Greece to New York City to Vegas -- each one takes on its own sense of being in my mind. Do you find that about your trips? There's a very distinct tattoo or aftertaste each trip leaves on your spirit.

For this last Vegas trip -- which only lasted a week -- I will retain always the memories of going down Route 66 with my favorite person chatting beside me. I'll remember the magic of Fremont Street as one night slid slowly into the early morning of the next. I'll remember the flat out excitement of being in The Boneyard -- and eating real french fries at Mr. D's Diner. I'll remember driving down a two lane highway with the windows down listening to great music with vast desert all around me.

I love travel.

Love it.

My father asked me the other day why I travel so much. There was a slight, unspoken criticism that maybe I spend too much time on "vacation." But I would beg to point out that there is a vast difference between a vacation and travel.

Those who vacation will sleep in, sit by the pool and live their lives measured by the meals they plan to consume. Travel is...being somewhere exciting and seeing something you have never seen before. It's trying to capture that wonderful magical experience with the click of a shutter. It's about getting up very early and staggering back to the hotel with aching feet -- but knowing you have a couple of hundred pictures you can't wait to see and share. For me it's also about experiencing all this with my wife -- and, at that is the sweetest thing of all.

Yup. There's a difference between vacation and travel. What did Patton say? "For those who understand, no explaination is necessary. For those who don't...no explaination is possible."

I suspect they will need to strap my wheelchair into the spaceship in about forty years. But God willing -- I will still be going to places both old and new with Sheree. And if I go -- I will have my camera. And if I have my camera -- Photoshop won't be far away either.

So there.

Surviving the Las Vegas Strip

It's a little before 8:00 in the morning. I can already smell the hot sun on the pavement of Las Vegas. My wife and I are creeping across the street from our rented condo at Granville. We are going to play a little on the Wizard of Oz slot machine. We figure if we go early, we'll get there before the problem gamblers arrive. (You just shush.)

The South Point casino has four of these machines, one right next to the other and last night they were choked with happy, laughing people who were cleaning up with jackpot after jackpot.

My wife is a huge Wizard of Oz fan and she loves slot machines. I love the fact that this is a penny slot machine...so it takes marginally longer to eat your money.

We cross the casino...all senses tingling, fingers teasing the allocated but no-doubt doomed dollars in our pockets. At first I am surprised at how many people are here at such an hour. (You can never tell what time it is in the casino. It could be mid morning. It could be midnight.)

"Boy...there sure are a lot of problem gamblers here this morning," I comment to my wife.

She gets the joke -- but is ignoring me.

"You'd have to be half crazy to be in a casino before breakfast," I add cleverly.

She ignores me some more.

"Holy smokes! You'd have to be--"

She turns to me and fixes me with blue eyes just on the edge of saying something really nasty. I grin and make a lock-box motion with my finger at the edge of my lips, waggling my eyebrows in my very most innocent manner. After fixing me with a "Shut up and I mean it" look, my wife takes my hand and we walk together to the back of the casino where the Wizard of Oz slot machines are.

There are two people sitting there. One is an enormous woman, who barley fits on the stool. Her clothes are sweat-stained and a cigarette smoulders in an ashtray beside her. She is mechanically pushing the "Bet Maximum" button and I realize that this particular penny slot machine is taking her for about three bucks a roll.

Beside her is a man. His chin is on his chest and he is breathing heavily, showing every sign of a someone who is either sleeping deeply or has passed away unnoticed at some point during the night. He wears sweat pants (more to make a fashion statement, than as actual workout gear) and a sweat shirt that may have fit well about fifty pounds ago.

The woman hits a jackpot. The machine has a small siezure. Her expression doesn't change. Not a bit. She keeps pressing the Bet Max button again and again. For reasons I do not fully understand, the whole tableau is starting to depress me.

My wife and I hate the smell of smoke and she wanders off to another game. I, however, am transfixed. It's not unlike watching the same train wreck over and over again.

This woman bets again and again and again and within the space of just a few minutes, she's lost a couple of hundred dollars. All her money has fallen victim to that most reliable staple of Vegas magic: POOOF! It's gone. She pokes the man and wordlessly they rise and shamble off.

I am left thinking of "Undead Casino Zombies" because the way they move makes me remember George Romero's creatures. I start to wonder if the entire purpose of the exercise was to give her money to the slot machine in the first place and now she can finally relax because it's gone.

A girl in a costume that can't be comfortable comes around with a tray full of beer and highballs.

"Cocktails?" she asks no one in particular. "Cocktails?"

It's not even nine o'clock in the morning, I wonder out loud.

This isn't Las Vegas. It's the Island of Lost Boys. It's "para-dice." It's the rabbit hole.

For just a second I feel like an alien dropped into a strange world. All around me slot machines purr and hum and spin. People smoke with a strange meditative manner that tells you they are far, far away and their world has contracted to the few inches of dancing light in front of their eyes. It's still relatively early so there aren't loud hardware salesmen types thumping each other on the back in male bonding rituals at the craps table.

Nope. At this hour it's quiet. It's intense and resigned all at the same time. It's very strange.

Here are some tips for surviving the Strip:

1) Don't go.

2) If Point 1 isn't an option, then ensure you take picture ID with you. On the very off chance you hit a jackpot, you will need ID to get your money. It's actually a Nevada law that you must have ID in casinos. This way, also, if you have a heart attack they will know where to send the body.

3) Try to limit what you are going to bet. My father once told me to take twenty dollars, put it into one pocket and when it's gone -- to walk away. It sounds basic, right? But just think about it for a second. People put more money into the machines because they are expecting a payoff. They expect to get their money back. I remember a college psych class where the prof said "that to do the same thing over and over in the expectation of a different outcome is the purest definition of insanity." You do the math.

4) Yes. The drinks are free. But tip the girl a buck, okay? Maybe you'd like to be trapped in those shoes eight hours a day? And remember: the more you drink, the dumber you get. Do you think it's possible the casinos want it that way? Nah.

5) Taking pictures inside casinos will get you a great deal of immediate attention. I don't know what the issue is -- but security people appear out of nowhere when you start pointing a camera around. This can be highly entertaining if you do it four times in a row at the same casino -- pretending you don't speak english each time. (Okay...maybe I find it entertaining.)

The pictures here were taken at Treasure Island, by the way, on the only day we spent on the Strip. I would have included some of the shots I took of slot machines...but I am pretty sure that I'll get the chair if I actually admit I have them.

Signs of the Times: Vegas Neon

There are some things that video just does better than still photography. I started figuring that out around the midnight hour on Fremont Street in Las Vegas.

That's when they turn on all the vintage signs and since both my wife and myself LOVE these signs, we were looking forward to photographing them.

You are not going to get a better exposure or a tighter crop than the picture on the left. It was an amazing sign. The colors came on in impressive waves and, by prefocussing and judging the time exactly, I was able to hit the shutter button when all the lights were on.

It's still not a very interesting picture, is it?

Neon and flashing lights are about...well...neon and flashing. You can't convey that in a photo. You can just capture that one second and hope that is able to give your viewer a taste of what it was like to be there.

Even when the sign itself is interesting, like "Smoking Good Times" you still won't get a great image. It's like taking a picture of a picture, or someone else's artwork to me.

If we are taking pictures as graphic artists, we need to take pictures that show our subject in a new light, and hopefully convey a sense of that subject. Otherwise it's a picture of a picture, neon or not.


I am told that the name of this neon girl is "Vegas Vicki." She is currently working over a "Gentlemen's Club" in Fremont Street.

As I stood there late in the night, I had a sneaking suspicion that my neon sign graphics weren't going to be all that interesting. So I started taking pictures at odd angles, with strange close-ups.

I wanted to take the neon out of this picture so FIRST I copied the original layer and blured it a little. I wanted to take the harshness of the flat neon lines out. Then I added a blur around the outside of the graphic, since I wanted only her face to be featured.

I copied the original again onto it's own layer and worked adding a brush-stroke texture my graphic. Reducing the Opacity on this layer to about 40% allowed me to have a whisper of that texture come through to make the picture have a "painterly" effect.

Finally -- I flattened the layers and took the whole mess to Virtual Painter's Watercolor filter. I use this plug in all the time and it did a great job on de-neoning the whole graphic.

There's another multi-layered "saloon type neon girl" a little further down Freemont. I looked at this sign for several minutes before I started shooting.

I was trying to see it in a different light.

"What else could she be?" I asked myself.

"She's a superhero," I answered me -- surprising myself with the observation as well as drawing some odd looks from passersby.

So I shot her that way. When I was done, her hand is in the air and she looks like Wonder Woman about to kick someone's butt.

I worked with a Contrast Adjustment Layer to bring the colors down to five or six primary colors. I added a halftoned look and finally took the whole graphic to Alien Skin's Snap Art Comic Book filter. I added a brick wall texture very gently behind the main figure and am very pleased with the final result.

Here are 5 Kick-Butt Tips for Shooting Neon Signs at Night:

1) Brace Your Camera: A tripod is a great idea. But, since I am pretty lazy about what I carry, I have also found fence posts, light standards, garbage cans etc. wonderful places to put my camera down to avoid the dreaded "night shake" syndrome.

2) Use Your Delayed Shutter: This is the setting you use when YOU want to be in the picture. Usually it's a three to ten second delay after you press the shutter button. This allows you to avoid camera shake since the camera is no-doubt-about-it still and stays still after the shutter's pushed.

3) Make Sure You Consider Your Scene Modes or a High ISO: A common problem with night is the...ummm...darkness. So you need to give your camera every break. I'd much rather get an exposure that is a little dark because I can tease the detail out using Photoshop. If the exposure is too light -- that detail's not there.

4) Take LOTS of Pictures From Odd Angles: You never know how you are going to be using the shots. But if you take LOTS of shots you have a very good chance of seeing one you can use for whatever strange and wonderful treatment you have in mind.

5) Study your Subject BEFORE You Start Shooting: What else could it be? Is there one part of the image that would make a great close-up? Could the picture be of something other than what it is? Could a soldier be a superhero? Could a sunset be an atomic explosion?'