Federer wallpapers

Speaking of wallpapers, I already had a previous obsession with wallpapers sometime last year when I went through a period of creating my own wallpapers featuring tennis great Roger Federer. This came even earlier than my experiments with transforming photos into watercolor "paintings" from photos using Photoshop.

Being a big Roger Federer fan, I thought I'd search the Internet for Federer wallpapers to use as a desktop background. But I was disappointed. There weren't that many and the few available were not what I had exactly in mind. Having a collection of Federer photos downloaded from the Internet myself, I decided to start creating my own. I began with wallpapers with a black background; those were the easiest to make since it was easier to augment a photo with a plain black background. Besides, I actually prefer black wallpapers. Here's one of the very first ones I made using a photo where the dramatic lighting in the photo was such that you'd swear it was a shot in a studio. (This was Federer's match against Hewitt in the semifinals at the US Open in 2005 played in the late afternoon.)
When there weren't many photos that could be easily blended into a black background, I thought I'd try out the clone tool combined with layers in Photoshop to extend the backdrops of the photos to fill in the rest of the background. I particularly love this one where Federer stands out from the hardcourt where the green and blue colors are already slightly muted in the original photo due to the early afternoon lighting (US Open 2006).
It soon became my goal to create an illusion such that you couldn't tell where the court ended and where the wallpaper started--Escher-like kind of stuff. Here's one of the last few I made early this year before the novelty of making wallpapers wore off.
Eventually making Federer wallpapers became such an preoccupation that there were evenings (when I'd basically have my only free time) when I'd spend time browsing through my collection of Federer photos to search for those that would be a good basis for a wallpaper and start working. Often when I had nothing else to do, I'd churn out three to four wallpapers.

Before I outgrew this wallpaper phase, I managed to make some forty-five 1024x768 Federer wallpapers that are up to my standards (ahem!) and am now using for my photos screensaver. I more recently added two more and have also made two wallpapers featuring the Spanish clay court specialist Rafael Nadal. Yes, he may be Roger's greatest rival nowadays (great player but he's a threat to Federer so ... hehe) but I couldn't resist taking a photo of him in a dynamic pose, his teal and black outfit standing out against the red clay court surface and making it into another wallpaper.
All I'm doing now is waiting for Federer to begin playing again so that I can make more wallpapers. Or perhaps in the meantime I can modify the existing ones to use on a widescreen monitor. Uh-oh.