Winter trees

We were riding around today and I saw these trees silhouetted against a cloudy, almost stormy sky.  I liked the texture of the clouds and the way the sun peaked through between the limbs.

Hobbes with effects

Today I'm practicing some techniques I've been learning in my Digital Lightroom class.  I took a simple photo of Hobbes, converted it to B&W and then used a duo-tone method with a clear light blue and black to replicate an old cyanotype photo.  I added a blue, black and gray Polaroid border to complement the tone and layered a background texture I made a couple of weeks ago of stone to give the photo grain.  It's an okay image, but the main purpose is learning how to use these techniques.  I'm really enjoying this class.  Last night we learned to print on art paper and the results are quite beautiful.

Bhutan bowl

A short post tonight.  I've been playing around with my printer all day and didn't have much time to take a photo.  So....this is a "singing" bowl we brought back from Bhutan a few years ago.  As a instrument for meditation, you use the wooden paddle to rub around the edge of the bowl and it makes a beautiful ringing tone.  Different size bowls make different pitched songs.  The meditative quality comes from maintaining the ringing which takes focused concentration.  It becomes the focal point of the meditation.

To create this soft color, I processed this image using a duotone method, combining a pale golden yellow with a light periwinkle blue.

Fire Station "Joiner"

    For my class this week our assignment is to do a "joiner".  It's basically a collage of photos put together to recreate the whole in an abstract or sometimes cubist style.  Last week we studied the work of David Hockney who first created this art.  One of the links to his work is www.hockneypictures.com so you can see what a real joiner looks like.  We created our joiners on Photoshop as compared to Hockney who used printed photos.
   I both enjoyed and struggled with this assignment for many reasons.  On my first attempt, my photos were too precise.  I used my tripod and adjusted the exposure and focal length so that I captured the entire scene as carefully as possible (I took over 200 images).  What I created was a fairly precise reproduction of the image, but not the least bit interesting (I've included it here....it's a park bench).  Then I read some on-line articles about how to create this type of art and realized that the "art" of it is to change the exposure, perspective and angle of the camera to give the work a more abstract look.  So, I did that with the photographs I took for this image of the Fire Station on Laurel Lane.  I was able to "flatten out" a three dimensional scene and I made the fire engine larger and used a different perspective for it to make it a more prominent subject.
   I also wanted to do St. Mary's church and the Vietnam Memorial, but the scene was very spread out and I didn't take enough "in between" photos to make a cohesive whole. I still want to do that scene, but I'll need to take some additional photographs to make it work to way I envision.
  Of course for all three of these attempts I only spent about 30 minutes to an hour at each site.  I read an article about Hockney spending 8 weeks just to get the images for one of his works.   I took 57 shots for this "Fire House" project and ended up, after hours of trial and error) only using 19 of them.  It was like putting together a puzzle and I enjoyed the mental challenge of that aspect of the assignment.  I have to admit, though, that it really messed with my brain.  Part of me - my left-brain analytical, judgmental part - wanted it to fit together perfectly while the other part of my brain - my right side artistic, creative part - wanted it to look more abstract.  I was surprised at how difficult it was to reconcile these opposing mindsets.

   Do I love the end result?  No, not particularly.  I'm probably not interested enough in this art form to do a lot of it and can't see hanging this in my house, but the project was challenging and I learned a great deal about Photoshop and myself in the process.

"E" is for Empty

It was warm here in Blowing Rock today and I was able to spend a rare few minutes out on the porch in the late afternoon sunshine.  The porch is bare with no pillows or lamps or plants.  It felt very empty.  So, in keeping with my alphabet theme..."E" is for Empty.

Vietnam Memorial

Today I decided to shoot some photos at St. Mary's church and the Vietnam Memorial.  Once I was there I realized that I had never stopped to look at the Memorial.  I thought it would be like the one in D.C. where the names of the soldiers who died would be listed.  Instead, this memorial documents the events of the war by year.  I didn't have time to read the entire wall, but I'll definitely go back and spend time to absorb it.  Here is a section of the wall.

In honor of spring

I took a walk today and shot a bunch of photos for the project I'm doing this week in my photography class, but on the way home, I took these two shots that captured the wonderful springlike weather of the day.  A hopeful sign that after all this nasty weather we will eventually have spring.