Around the house: tulips

It was a gloomy, misty morning yesterday and as I was sitting, reading, having coffee, I noticed the tulips. Tulips always make me feel great -- colorful, sunny, spring-like -- so, without moving at all, I took an iPhone shot.

The resulting photo (the second one) is pretty much how the overall scene looked. But it didn't express how I feel about tulips.

I brought the image into Snapseed and purposely overexposed the image to the point of yes! Are highlights blown out? Yes. But that didn't matter. It was the look and feel of springtime that I wanted (and got).

It's an iPhone shot and the quality is bad. But it sure improved the quality of that little moment in time yesterday morning.

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.

What I saw, what I made

I get this all the time. "What the heck are you shooting?" "Why did you take that picture?" "What are you gonna do with that?"

And I completely understand. Here's my thought process.

We were poking around a boatyard/dump/repair facility in Anacortes, Washington and I saw a weathered wall with grungy stuff running down it, with scrapes and scratches and bits of paint.

Adrenaline rush!

I knew there was something there that I could use later, but I didn't know why or what. I just knew it was important.

Click.

My first go-round with the elements in that top picture turned into this vivid blue and red picture that could easily have been an old metal sign, perhaps a graphic element on the side of a weathered fishing boat. To create it, I took my original photo and simply added more lines, some color, and part of something else that I don't remember now.

Colorful grunginess. That's why I like the second photo. It's almost an oxymoron.

I came across the top photo again another day and wondered what else I could do. I copied it, flipped it, put in a bit of color here and there, and added the two yellowish vertical elements on the left.

I felt the arrow had to be pointing toward something, so I added a photo I'd taken of some rivets in Oregon.

But then the bottom right seemed empty to me, so I added a photo of some lettering I shot on the side of a Willys Jeep on the Oregon coast. Done!

And now you know why I get up so early in the morning.

©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.

What I saw . . . What I made

I found all these metal tubs in a boat yard in Oregon and the first thing that caught my eye was the repeating pattern all the stacked "edges" made.

But what I really liked were the handles. It's one thing to have a repeating pattern, it's another to have a focal point or a design of some sort.

So I found three (rule of thirds, don't you know!) handles that were sort of bunched together and that's what I focused on.

As you can see from the overview photo, the light was harsh. If I were to do this again, I might also concentrate on incorporating some handle shadows as a subject.

See the bottom-most tubs? See how the shadows hang down against the smooth surface? There are some photos to be made there, too.

Oh, sure . . . the moment I move away from Oregon I find something I should have shot when I lived there! Typical.

©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!

What I saw / What I made

The reason I like photographing fishing nets so much is that I enjoy making order out of chaos. Big overviews don't do it for me, but simply wandering around and looking for details is exciting and, frankly, it's what I'm good at. So being surrounded by color and texture, lines and forms, it's like being at Disneyland.

In the first photo you see an overview of a pile of nets. My "job" is to simplify the view, find something within the whole to frame and present.

What I liked about the big pile of nets was that area in the yellow rectangle (first photo). I liked the slightly diagonal line of one rope holding the bundle of nets together. And I liked how the edge of the netting sort of swoops down there in the bottom right corner. Two big diagonal lines going two directions that enclose the repeating pattern of all the ropes, which also are moving diagonally, just in a softer curve.

I probably could have stood there and made four more photos, but like a kid, I wanted to see MORE, so off I went.

How to see is the hardest thing to teach, so I just thought you'd like to see what I saw and what I did with it. 

©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!

What I saw / What I made

Back in 2012 we were at Lake Tahoe and I saw this tree. I photographed it knowing that how it actually looked wasn't all that wonderful, but that maybe I could do something with it later to make it different.

So here you see the tree, a pine, silhouetted against the lake. The background consists primarily of horizontal elements, from bottom to top, sunlit sand, heavy shadow, very bright sand, shades of blue, and then the mountains on the other side.

The strong vertical silhouette of the tree is what connects all that horizontality, holds everything together.

Three years later, I finally figure out what I want to do with this tree. I used a variety of Photoshop artistic filters as well as some painterly effects in Topaz and came up with this version.

The tree is now much lighter and brighter and looks fluffier than before. I like how a texture I used turned the horizontal stripes of the background into softer elements and changed the colors to shades of robin's egg blue and grey. And it's kind of cool how at the very bottom, that bit of sunlit sand now almost looks like another strip of water.

Done. Shipped off to Fine Art America. We'll see if someone would love to have it on their wall.

And now I shall resume rummaging around my photographs, seeing if, with the skills I have today, I can change something else I photographed years ago.

©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!