Humboldt Nation: Original Visionary ART.

digital MAX visits the big city...

 space frontier. a voyage in the memory of Star Trek.

THE UMMAGUMMA OF CAMBRIDGE:

When the aliens found out that their spaceship was infested with ummagumma they stopped at the first planet (earth) and dumped them. The place was called Stonehenge.

The ummagumma are an annoying life form that supports themselves by petty theivery. They were first reported in Dickens books...you know... Oliver Twist...Pickpockets...They also have an annoying habit of taking things apart and not putting them back. Have you ever noticed that for some unknown reason things just "go on the blink" ?

That's the work of the Ummagumma. For centuries they lived in the swamps near Oxford (Cambridge) but one day the walked down to the docks and snuck aboard a boat.

When the captain found out that his boat was infested with ummagumma he stopped in the first port and dumped them. He threw them right overboard and into the San Francisco bay.

They swam to shore and quickly blended into the population. You see... they are short and brown and could be mistaken for Chinamen...

Stay tuned...next time they disassemble Sutro tower in a futile attempt to "call an intergalactic taxi".

And then they wander down the coast and climb... UMUNHUM mountain...The giant box on the mountain overlooking the city of Saint Joe.

The Ummagumma always stowaway and they just had to get off the planet earth. This planet's just too boring. Got to get back to the Swinging Planets in the Crab Nebula...That's where all the Fun Is. Until next time this is gregvan signing off...

While this story is obviously fiction, it does tell the basics of the UMMAGUMMA.

The band Pink Floyd named their record after local ledgends...

These classic "gregvan" style images were created mostly with obsolete image processing software... the beautiful ARCSOFT PHOTOSTUDIO 2.0 However, the program Adobe Photoshop Elements is a fine work as well. I really like the polar to rectangular distort and the perspective transformation. The blue checkerboard above was done with that perspective transform...

A handy hint... An image compressed by ARCSOFT .jpg setting 90% is about half the size of Adobe save for web .jpg 90% Then when they are displayed on the internet, they look the same... Go Figure...

ARCSOFT has a superb mirror transform and a find contour filter that allows for easy, yet powerful frames for an image... As you may have noticed, I love to create an image, copy it, find contour and then paste original image back... then blend -range of soft edge=10 pixels... this causes a black border with red, green, and blue sparkly stuff in exactly the same location as the images in the picture...  You can see this effect in the painting above labeled Mr and Mrs XZYXXYXZ... see how the edges get dark?

The main thing to understand is that a person can use BOTH programs on the same image... Use the strengths of each to get maximum return...

by the way, The GIMP has a fine selection of lens flares... and PAINT.NET has a mindblowing polar inversion... both are free programs... get them!