Day 83 of 365 Day Challenge

I'm still playing around with my iPhone 6 telephoto lens and took a picture of a little sparrow.  It wasn't entirely focussed so I took it into SketchClub and traced the edges in black. Once I had done this I took the picture into Repix and posterised it. Then I took a texture of mine into iColorama and used the Brushes>Artist option to make a painterly background. I then used this as a background and used Brushes>Bound to bring in the bird and then the background at a lower opacity. I textured it slightly in Stackables and then back into iColorama to add a border.

Day 41 of 365 Day Challenge

Although I have done a lot of photo manipulation over the past 5 years, I never really concentrated on actual photography and I feel this is an area I could significantly improve on, so I joined Nina de Vries of Snap! Photography on a group walk in Hong Kong Park to improve my photography with a DSLR.

This meant that I didn't get many iPhone pictures but I did manage to take a couple here and there. While we were in the aviary, a Bali Starling was posing on the railings and I got some lovely shots of him with my iPhone as I was able to get close. Here is one. I cropped it in Snapseed and then cleaned up some of the background in Photoshop Touch. Finally, I used the Paint option in iColorama to give it a painterly look:

Meditative Art

There's lots going on in my life at the moment and I felt a strong need to connect back to my art.  There is something very meditative for me about taking a picture and transforming it in the solitude of my den.

I wasn't looking at doing anything spectacular but I wanted to produce something from the spur of the moment pictures that I photographed in Hilton Head last year.  So for starters I chose a crow on the beach, some butterflies in a garden and a little sparrow hovering under our restaurant table.

Here is what I came up with:

All very different.  The only thread was the use of mosaic tiles and stain glass filters.  I often wonder if I will start developing a specific style but every picture I choose seems to speak to me in a different way.

Robin

Happy Valentine's Day

I went to the Royal Wisley Gardens last week to see the butterflies in the Glasshouse.  However it was a miserable day and because of this the butterflies were not opening their wings and I think, being towards the end of the attraction, the butterflies were quite sparse.

Anyhow, I got my reward because while photographing flowers in the other part of the glasshouse, two little robins who had got themselves into the glasshouse came out of the foliage and sat and watched me.  So here is one of them.  I added a bit of a Valentine's twist to the picture and even his breast seems to have a heart shape to it! Isn't he lovely.

I like Torsdag

Pelican

Photo Art Friday

I'm on a roll with my silhouette method and decided to try it with the texture provided with the Photo Art Friday challenge and I really like the result. As in my previous post I added in the colour of the bird and the colour of the texture has given it another tint:

Challenging Myself

I have lots of photos in my library which I like but which are really not up to scratch.  My husband took this photo of waxwings in Mexico:

They weren't close, the light was fairly tricky and the whole branch was swaying in the wind but I love the way they are all pointing in the same direction and in such a big group.

Could I take this photo and make anything of it??

Whenever I transform a picture like this, I ask myself about the result 'would I put that on my wall?'.  I think I would.  It's quite funky.  I'm not sure about the background but the wonderful thing about Photoshop Elements is that I can change that at anytime.

New Manipulations

I'm always on the hunt for new ways of manipulating pictures and at the moment I am particularly interested in doing something with buildings which are never easy to improve or make spectacular.  While I was making a silhouette figure for a website I stumbled across a new way of manipulating pictures.

Here is the original picture taken of Provincetown in Cape Cod and changes :

It's always interesting to me that what works for one picture doesn't necessarily work for another and I was interested to see whether my new method worked for a completely different picture.  I was quite pleased with the results.

One thing clear to me whenever I do any manipulations is that, unless you are doing a drastic manipulation, the sharper the picture the better the result.

Crested Guan

I'm running out of pictures to manipulate so I went back over some of my old pictures and came across this one that I took in Costa Rica.  This was a picture of a Crested Guan that was slightly blurred so decided to give it the full treatment and then finally blended it with a fun circuit board texture.

Old Pictures of South Africa

I was looking through some of my old pictures of South Africa and wondered whether I could spice any of them up a bit.  Many of them were traditional holiday pictures but I had a go with 2 of them.  I wanted to give the guinea fowl a bit more umph and I wanted to turn the street scene of Franshoek into an old pic but because of the cars it was a bit tricky. Not sure about it.

Water Bird

Trogan

Do I love birds, or do I love birds!  My husband took the picture in Costa Rica and this is my photo manip.

Sunbirds in Thailand

Just love birds..... Here are some taken by my husband and I in Thailand.