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!