The Beach and Texture Tuesday

Just back from a week at the beach and am totally behind in everything, but I did want to jump back in and post a shot for Kim Klassen's Texture Tuesday today. This shot of  my son and grandson was edited in LR and then taken into Photoshop where I applied Kim's new Quiet texture. The word art is by Ali Edwards. I'm thinking I may have to do a canvas for my grandson's bedroom of this. Thanks for stopping in. I always love having visitors!

Friday Finds Finally

After one of my usual loooong blogging breaks, I just had to share today on Kim Klassen's Friday Finds.  I feel like I hit the jackpot! I have been looking for and creating backgrounds for my still life shots for Kim's Be Still 52 class. I've painted a watercolor background as well as a white tray to use as a backdrop. You can read my post about that over at my collaborative blog Focusing on Life. But I have been searching for some old wood or an old fence and have been unsuccessful so far.

However, in the Be Still Lounge I came across a post about creating a distressed wood background. You can read it here if you're interested. I purchased all the supplies (for a total of less than $40) and spent the morning painting. I won't go into the details of how I created this because I followed the exact instructions on the website, but I do have to say that it was easy, peasy!  One side are these beautiful aqua tones and the other side is a distressed white. You will be seeing a lot of these backgrounds in my photos in the future!

Then yesterday I went to the salvage shop called Sweet Salvage to see if I could find any interesting props. They are only open one weekend a month (Th-Sun) and it's a good thing or I would go broke! Always fun things to find there.  I found this little bowl that so reminded me of Kim that I just had to have it. Little did I know when I bought it that it was going to go so perfectly with my new aqua board background and these apricots that I grabbed at the market yesterday. Kismet, I tell you!

So those are my finds for this week. If you haven't checked out Kim's Friday Finds, do yourself a favor and  head  over there. Lots of fun and inspiration to be found!

App Happy Wednesday Week 11

Playing along with Barb Brookbank and her App Happy Wednesday today.  If you haven't visited, it's a great resource for finding new apps to play with.

I recently discovered this fabulous iPhone photography tutorial on a blog called The Art of Digital Photo Painting and couldn’t wait to give it a try.  Many of the apps used were ones I already had but hadn’t been using, mostly because I hadn’t taken the time to learn how to use them correctly.  But this looked like a lot of fun, so I decided to give it a try.

Since she used a photo taken in Venice, Italy, I decided the best way to follow along and know that I was doing it right was to use a similar photo. I pulled out an old (2003) photo taken with my big camera on a trip to Italy and decided to use that. Although the photo wasn’t taken with my phone, all the editing was done on my iPad.

Here is the original photo:

I followed the tutorial exactly, step by step, and I do admit that it took a while to edit this shot because I was feeling my way with each app but I learned a lot of what each app is capable of doing along the way and I know that I will be using them again.

The only thing I did beyond the tutorial was to take my image into Squareready to add the drop shadow, making it look like a painting hanging on the wall.

Here is the final edited version:

 

The second time I went through the tutorial, things came a bit easier and I’m sure before long I’ll be using all of these apps and doing the edits much quicker, so if you try this, don’t get discouraged. It is well worth the effort. Obviously you don't have to use a photo taken in Venice! I'm looking forward to trying this with a lot of different styles of photos. Be sure to let me know if you try it and share your results. I’d love to see them!

 

Friday Finds -- Peonies, a Bottle and Classes to Take

With the summer heat already upon us, getting out and shooting becomes more and more of an effort. It is like winter in the rest of the country -- the weather just keeps you indoors. So I thought that Kim Klassen's Be Still 52 class would be perfect for me. I have always admired her still life photography and the chance to learn from the master was impossible to resist. The photo above was my first week's submission and I have to admit I really enjoyed playing with just a bottle that I picked up at Ross and one of my peonies from Trader Joe's.  I set up a couple of pieces of white foam core on a chair (I don't have any cute little peeling-paint chairs like Kim does!) and I played. This shot was actually taken and processed with my iPhone.

This week's assignment in Kim's class was all about breathing, taking the time to just be still and breathe. My peonies came to the rescue again as a photographic subject and I played with this shot (again taken on the white foam core) using Kim's True Grit LR preset and her Rainy Day texture. I felt it needed more so I then applied Kim's Daisy texture at soft light as well as her Silence texture at multiply. The quote is one I have always loved from Oprah Winfrey. As far as applying textures and editing, I don't know how you ever know when you're done! So many fun things to try. But this exercise accomplished the desired effect -- making me slow down, focus, breathe and be totally in the moment of capturing beauty.

I am also taking Kim Manley Ort's class called Keeping it Simple which I thought would be a good complement to the Be Still class.  This is another peony shot taken at the same time but with no processing. We are learning about the difference between "simplicity" and "minimalism" this week. See how it is dovetailing the Be Still class?

Then, of course, I had to give it a try with my iPhone camera. I mean, you have to take advantage  of having peonies while they last!

No processing on this, just the addition of the text.

So there you have it -- my Friday finds were a bunch of peonies from Trader Joe's, a great (and cheap!) bottle from Ross, and two classes that are making me very happy!