Benz World Blog » Movie

Jason Bournee

Jason Benz — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 08:31:49 +0000

On Thursday I picked up my first Australian Passport. I did not have to give up my UK passport so now I can pretend to be Jason Bourne with his choice of passports. To make this image I started by finding a reference image from the movie. I was going to take a new photo to match the pose then I saw it was the Hollywood standard “look up with menace” which I did in 2010 for the Avatar post. I dug out the old RAW file and Re-processed it in Camera RAW as a Black&White with extra shading. Finally, some texture from the reference image was added in Photoshop. All together the process was quicker than taking a new photo.

Blues Brother

Jason Benz — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 21:41:45 +0000

This is original Blues Brother and band leader Blue Lou Marini on the Crossroads stage of Bluesfest 2016. If he looks familiar you may remember him washing dishes at Aretha Franklins cafe in the classic 1980 film The Blues Brothers. 36 years later they are still wearing sunglasses at night.

Today I applied for media accreditation at Bluesfest 2017 and hope to post daily images from the festival.

This image is available for download here.

Silverton Hotel

Jason Benz — Mon, 09 May 2016 08:36:30 +0000

This is the Silverton Hotel in outback New South Wales, Australia. There cannot be many pubs which have been in so many films they can build an awning out of its own alternate name signs. Mad Max II, Razorback, A Town Like Alice, Dirty Deeds, The Craic and more beer ads than a cane toads grandkids.

Pirate Set

Jason Benz — Sun, 28 Jun 2015 08:00:44 +0000

This is one of the sets of the new Pirates of the Caribbean film “Dead Men Tell No Tales” which is currently being filmed on the Gold Coast in Queensland. They have fenced off a long sand beach on the Southport Spit until the 17th July 2015.

I am sending my camera and lens back to Canon for repair so I will have to keep the photoblog going with new processing of old files from Australia, Egypt, Jamaica, Cuba and the UK.

Lightning Ridge

Jason Benz — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:29:03 +0000

Lightning Ridge is a mining town in New South Wales. It has the planets richest deposit of black opal. This corrugated iron building was used in the film The Goddess of 1967, which is about a Japanese man who travels to Australia to buy a car.

The Dish

Jason Benz — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:57:20 +0000

This is the CSIRO Radio Telescope in Parkes. It was used in 1969 to receive the pictures of the first Moon landing. Its story was further immortalised in 2000 when it played the starring role in the film “The Dish”. Today it is still a working Telescope and thanks to upgrades it is 10,000 times more sensitive than when it was built in 1961. Last night we camped outside Parkes and are now approaching the Blue Mountains from the west.

Benz Avatar

Jason Benz — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:55:04 +0000

This was an interesting Photoshop challenge. You don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard to do this as long as you can get your head round Photoshop masks. I started by taking a self portrait while trying to imagine the camera had just burnt down my favourite tree. I turned my skin blue by setting the cameras white balance to 2000K. After a quick google image search for “Avatar” I had two more images ready to be composited in Photoshop. One avatar poster which I can use for the skin and one close up of an avatar eye. The images only had one side so I needed to copy and flip them to cover my whole face. By having the eyes on separate layers I could move them to sit directly in line with my own pupils. The position of your main features is how your friends brains identify you. I used Photoshops liquify to change the shape of my nose and mouth. I applied a mask to each layer to blend them together. Finally I darkened one side of the face so to make the lighting appear more realistic.