Here are some examples of my current digital art and digital photography work.
 
 

This picture stems from a trip I took to Eagle Harbor, Michigan.  There is a lighthouse and maritime museum there.  The harbor is small, and has not been used for commercial shipping since the early Twentieth Century.  It is a very picturesque harbor, however, and I though I could produce with digital photography what it might have looked like at the turn of the Twentieth Century.  I had already built a model of an 1870s lake freighter, the Huron Brave.  I took a picture of the harbor with my Canon 35mm camera.

When I got home, I scanned the photo of Eagle Harbor.  I then took a photo of the model with my digital camera.  I then cut out most of the ship from the later picture (cutting it off at the waterline) and pasted it into the harbor picture.  I was careful to shoot the model with the sun angle I best remember when I took the harbor picture.  The waves along the side of the side of the hull are painted on.  I also felt I had too much foreground water, and selected the beach and moved it up, cropping a bit of the bottom of the photo off.  I like the results- it is as if I were there with a color camera when an old ship sailed into the harbor when it was still used for commercial shipping.
 
 

I really enjoy images of early aviation.  And, auto racing, of course. I really wanted a picture of a match race between an early automobile and airplane. I had seen something like this in a restaurant.  Then, I came across an old B & W photo of a match race between Barney Oldfield and Lincoln Beachley.  I scanned this photo, and converted it to full (16 mil) color. I imported one of my stock sky/cloud photos to replace the bland sky of the original.  I had a picture of a Curtiss pusher taken at the AF museum that I used for color.  I cut and repositioned the race car to put it closer to the airplane, increased its size a bit and a slight mod of perspective.  Then, I added a new top layer.  I now, using the paint brush, painted over the complete photograph.  I used pictures I had for a race track, and people, to pick up colors.  When completely done, I then eliminated the original B & W photo layer and the stock sky photo layer. During the painting I simplified the detail in the infield and put the people in different positions.  I modified the tree line, and cropped some junk from the right side.

I printed this photo, but before doing so added a weave texture, which is not in the above image.
 

The horse belongs to a niece.  The engine is from a model dragster.  This is something I generated for a possible cover shot for a book I am working on tentatively titled Horsepower- the Story of the Internal Combustion Engine.
 
 

I used to do a lot of Kodalith derivatives when I was working with film photography.  I still like the effect of posterization on complicated machinery images.  Posterization is so easy to do now with a digital darkroom instead of making seperate Kodalith masks for each shade of gray and seperately printing them.
 

BACKGROUND

My involvement with digital imagery goes back further professionally than my hobby work.  In the late 70s I was working on imaging missile seekers that automatically tracked targets.  Originally these were to have analog computers for target tracking, but I was involved in a project to replace the analog image processor with a microprocessor-based digital one.

Also in about the same time period- mid to late 70s- one of my former co-workers moved from McDonnell Douglas to Fairchild.  He called upon us with info on the first CCD image chip for sale in US.  We ordered a couple, though we did not pursue a definite program with them (we were waiting for infrared [IR] versions, which never became really practical during my professional career.

After I moved to Honeywell in 1983 I was still working on mechanically scanned imagers, though we were working on mosaic focal plane technology.  I picked up an effort in digital image processing again.  We had another department whose specialty was computer image processing, but my work was on using early processing for testing and diagnostics, which fell in the sensors group of which I was a part.  I bought an analog/digital video converter and wrote my own processing software.  The project never went anywhere, however, as Honeywell continued to move away from military imaging sensors.

My first avocational interest in digital photography came when taking photos of vintage racing cars.  I was aware that the cluttered backgrounds (lots of people standing around cars should be fixable with software.  I bought some digital image software, and had a few roles of photographs processed onto a Kodak PhotoPC.  I then did doctor many of the images to remove background clutter.

My next project was to do photo restoration on some family history photographs.  They were all black and white.  I bought a black and white hand scanner for this project.  I am now on my second flatbed color scanner.  As my interest in digital photography grew, I bought more sophisticated software.  I know use Paint Shop Pro.  This software has such good paint functions that I began to do more creative stuff, half photography and half digital painting.  I am now creating entirely digital art which is not based on a photograph at all, as well as stuff that combines photographs with digital art.  I am also creating photos that never were, by combining two or more different photos.