Around the house: binoculars

Binoculars on the windowsill, just in case an eagle, a boat, a bunny, or an owl should soar, sail, hop, or swoop past.

Taken with an iPhone 6+ and tweaked using Lone Star effect. Kinda like how the binoculars really stand out black and bold against the sepia softness.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.

Around the house: beach treasures

Whenever I go to the beach, I always bring something home with me, some treasure that caught my eye, a little surprise, something interesting.

Right now, in a little turquoise pottery bowl that June White gave me (thank you, ma'am), you can see a heart-shaped rock, a couple of agates, some smooth stones, a stripey dark rock, and a couple of rocks that have small barnacles attached. The agates are from Oregon and the barnacles are from Whidbey Island.

Hoping to make this a daily routine, a daily post. Wish me luck!

Taken with iPhone 6+, Lone Star effect.

 ©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Early morning shadows

I create folk art primitive paintbrushes and have them on display here at the house. I like the way the early morning sun created strong shadows, both from the brushes as well as from the mullions on the windows. 

Do I paint with these? Pssshhhhh. No. (Well, with one I did, second from the right.) But I do make cool brushes! 

 ©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

iPhone photo du jour . . .

The coolest teapot was sitting on the table at a Chinese restaurant the other day, all heavy and metal and textured and worn. The table was a brownish-red color and had glare on it, glare that wasn't visible to the eye, but really stood out in a "normal" cellphone photograph.

I opted for an app called Camera Awesome and selected the (yet again) Lone Star effect, which negated the glare, got rid of the strident background color, and emphasized the shape and texture of the teapot.

I then brought the photo into Photoshop, toned down the Lone Star effect, which to me looked too red, added an edge sharpener from Topaz, and came up with this.

Kind of cool, the sort of things one sees while waiting for potstickers to arrive . . .

 ©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Around the house

A few years ago I gave a presentation at the Sandhills Photo Club in North Carolina. They treated me like royalty and we had a great time. Lots of laughter, lots of good photographers, lots of photo exploring. I found a magnolia seed pod and some other things on that trip that wouldn't fit in my suitcase, so I mailed them home.

As I was unpacking boxes in the studio this morning, I came across the box. Oh, boy! Cool stuff! I set the magnolia pod on the studio table, glanced down, and loved how it looked. So simple. Just sitting on the table. I got out the iPhone, selected the Camera Awesome app, opted for the Lone Star effect, and here's the result.

In the first photo you can see "Ramses," my oh-so-Georgia-O'Keeffe ram skull, who doesn't have a home quite yet (he looked especially handsome on the fireplace in Palm Springs), books, boxes, and a tripod/camera in the back.

But look at how cool the pod looks there on the table. I did take some overviews, but I particularly liked this close-up.

And people wonder why it's taking me so long to unpack? Well, sometimes you just have to stop and have a bit of fun while you work.

Technical stuff: Although I used the iPhone and some apps to make these photographs, the Lone Star effect can create a lot of contrast, washing out lighter-colored areas. I brought both photos into Photoshop and created a duplicate mask, used the "Multiply" blending mode to darken the entire photo, inverted the mask, and then used a brush to let some of the darker "Multiply" areas come through, specifically on the ram skull and horns. I should have cleaned things up on the table before taking the photos, but these were snapshots, nothing more.

 ©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Around the island . . .

We have our first house guest! What better excuse to get up, get out, and take a look around? He's a photographer, too, so it's great to be able to shoot the photographic breeze, learn a few things, and share some cool visual experiences.

Now that I've found my battery chargers, I can use the digital SLRs, but these were taken with my iPhone, using the Camera+ app and the Lone Star effect.

In between showers we visited Fort Casey, drove around the Coupeville-Port Townsend ferry docks, then to a marina (where it seriously rained until we scurried back to the car, when it promptly stopped), Langley, and then back to Coupeville. We head out again this morning after breakfast. Hoo ha!

And what did I learn last night at dinner? That CMD>L in Bridge will enlarge the picture big enough for me to determine if it's worth keeping or if I should trash it right then. This is probably the first thing one learns in Bridge, but nope, I never knew . . . much to our guest's amusement. Smart-ass.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Around the house . . .

Being sick isn't the pleasure cruise it was when I was younger. Upset stomach? Hooray! No school! Jello!

No, these days, when you know WAY too much, and you have WebMD right next to you on your iPad, you just know you're going to die a horrible death any minute.

But the past few days have been good and I've been shuffling around the house, iPhone in hand, seeing what I can find to amuse me photographically.

One afternoon there was a GIANT MOSQUITO on the window . . . Well, it's really a crane fly, no biting and drawing of blood involved with these harmless creatures, but they will always be GIANT MOSQUITOES to me. And he was OUTside. Perfect place for him.

So here you see him with a few of our trees in the distance and then Saratoga Passage in the distance beyond the trees. Then I wondered how closely I could focus on his eminence, and turns out that when using the Camera Awesome app I can take shots that are maybe 4x life-size. Fun stuff.

And then we have a basket of ceramic letters and numbers sitting on a cabinet in the entry. Oh, why not take a shot?

And finally there are the carved wooden ducks all lined up on top of the lawyer's bookcase. (Did you know I once applied to law school and they actually accepted me? But I came to my senses just in the nick of time and dodged that little career bullet.)

And so you see how pathetic this past week has been. Desperately looking for things to shoot. Warding off death at every turn. And fighting off GIANT MOSQUITOES, disguised as gentle crane flies . . .

 ©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Following a paper trail . . .

My friend Kathleen Amt has been playing around with paper and with her cellphone, also using this same "Lone Star" effect. She sent me a photo she took of some folded paper and, of course, it was brilliant.

So I looked around. What can I shoot and send to her? I've got a gull feather sitting on a bookshelf and so I held it up in front of the camera and made the first photo you see here. Sent it off to her.

Kathleen sent me another photo of scrap paper. Sigh. She's raised the bar pretty high. And she's made it clear she's working with and photographing paper, not anything like seagull feathers . . . I get the hint.

So I go out to the studio where I'm making envelopes (don't ask) and there are a lot of papers lying around. I arrange some corrugated cardboard bits and created the second photo you see here.

Then I layered some other papers and created another photo. (I figure if I can't create brilliance, I'll go for quantity.)

But then I figured it's time to change the game somewhat. So I photographed the flap of an envelope I'm working on, and have a lovely number "53."

So game on, Kathleen! I know you're going to send me another terrific shot of paper, but I'm changing direction. From now on it's just "what's around the house/studio."

But if you ignore me and send me yet another lovely photo of paper, I know I'll just have to follow your lead and see what additional paper shots I can come up with. Nothing like a little artistic nudge. For which I thank you.

 ©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Around the island . . .

We had a lot of business errands to take care of yesterday, but in between we managed to do a little exploring. And yeah, these are all with my iPhone app du jour, Camera Awesome, with the Lone Star effect.

The view of the wharf from Front Street is always a favorite of mine, this one taken from above Mosquito Fleet Chili Restaurant.

We also meandered a bit around Fort Casey, where I found a terrific "Dangerous Drop Off" sign to shoot, along with a couple shots of the lighthouse.

I've purposely been leaving the DSLR at home, forcing myself to shoot with the iPhone, but I'm missing the big camera. Never thought I'd say it, but I miss not setting up the tripod, carefully composing, changing f/stops, over- and underexposing, all the fussy things one does with a 35mm camera.

Of course, I can be fussy with the iPhone as well, but, probably because I don't know it as well, I don't find it as satisfying as the 35mm. And since there are things that I want to photograph and create a series, a "serious" series, the iPhone right now just doesn't cut it.

It's fun, though! And I'm taking some satisfying shots, perhaps an eventual series will emerge, but I want the quality and the ability to enlarge that my Canon gear gives me, rather than the small, limiting size of the cellphone.

So until someone invents an inexpensive, lightweight, pocket-sized, huge-sensored camera that shoots RAW, with an 18-600mm f/1.4 zoom lens, I've resigned myself to once again begin carrying the DSLR and all its attendant gear as well as the iPhone . . . sigh.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Before/After "Lone Star" Effect

Who doesn't love a before/after set of photos? We see this in home decor magazines, style magazines, but not so much in photography media. In a previous post I showed pictures I'd taken in a bistro using the iPhone 6Plus and an app called Camera Awesome. Within that app is an effect called Lone Star.

Here are the before and after versions of each shot:

 

 

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!