Garden & Photoart

First the boring news. Part of our old garden got tilled and I nearly burned my nekked feet trying to plant corn and a few other veggies. It is dusty and dry with no rain in sight. 

It is a small garden and getting up to water it predawn is not a bad chore. I'm going to buy my other fresh veggies at the Farmer's Market in town and privately from a woman that does vegetables as a business.

With the extreme heat, I needed a place to cool off. So Bear had me take out the kiddy pool.

Charlie hates the pool. I've sat in it to cool off and it makes a good place to stick bare feet after scalding them in the hot dirt.

Okay. PhotoArt. Artsy fartsy. I saw an ad on FB that had the photographer willing to 'teach' any person 'How to take artistic flower photos and get that dreamy effect'. He was also selling something called Overlays. This would be a layer to put 'over' a photo and 'create' the dreamy effect.

The Overlays were pretty pricey but really sort of neat. The 'course' was all about Creative Suite and how you could use overlays to 'create' better photos. It was expensive. [Wait...Create Better Photos? Don't you have to start out with a good one first????]

I am one of those that tries to figure things out myself. 

I went all out with a free paint program and a water color overlay I nabbed from the internet. It was not the effect I was looking for but I liked it enough to keep it. It is a geranium on my porch.

Next? Verbena in a pot with lavender behind it.

No overlays though. I used levels and curves in Corel PSP to bring the photo to emulate High Key. I added a layer and used a motion blur and used the layer setting to Screen. I erased or removed parts of the light colored layer to reveal just a few flowers.

I added a white vignette around the photo and I was done.

So I thought about overlays. Here is a sample of an overlay. 

Most of the overlays being offered in 'bundles' are bokeh, stars, clouds, rain, snow, and what not.

So I 'made' a couple in my old PS program.

So why on earth would you use an overlay?

I used the green one here just for kicks to see what would happen. I wanted it so subtle that I didn't want it obvious. I'm experimenting to see if I can really do something neat and cool.

I used the purple overlay here in PS to brighten this shot, it was pretty neat.

Here is an overlay that was another photo that was blurred. Interesting how it changes the 'look' of the shot.

My final choice was to go with the purple overlay.

Now the ones you can buy are totally cool. You can add soap bubbles, stars, and soft clouds. I like to dabble in the artsy fartsy stuff once in a while.

Still, I wasn't 'making' the Art that I saw in the ad [no I just stared at it and scrolled on by]. But maybe I should take an artsy class just once to see. I don't know how to tell if it is a scam or for real.

[I have taken two classes. Fine Art Black & White and Still Life. Both were good learning experiences.]

One of my old art edits:

I made this one into a greeting card.

Last is my purple overlay/soft contrast effect for a Still Life shot from our horribly hot HOT day.

My super cool hat along with my flowers set on that ugly trunk I wanted to get rid of. 

Original:

Edit:

I'm curious about learning new methods, but extra edit time isn't always what I want to do.

So I don't always do Artsy stuff. But I like to challenge myself to always learn something. 

After all, I did read tuts and watch vids to learn how to do OOB years ago and that really WAS fun! I'm not sure I have the patience for that intense editing anymore.

Eddie in Out of Bounds:

I'm not sure where I will go next with PhotoArt. But I will keep trying new things. I don't want this old brain to go stagnent.

Upstairs and experimenting

I really didn't want to move the bed in the tiny tiny room because to vacuum under it requires jiggling, lifting, this way and that and then moving the heavy bed a bit more one way and then the other way just to get under it and kill the dust monsters that lurk on the carpet under the bed.

While I was at it, I washed the walls down and changed the bedding.
It was snowing outside and it sounded like hail at the same time.

The weather was nuts. High winds, snow, then sunshine with snow and sunshine with glorious light.
And back to snow.

I stopped and looked through a forgotten album that had photos of my boys in it. It was a mix of dates stuck in a book so that I wouldn't lose them. The photos brought a smile to my face as I sat cross legged and looked through them slowly.

I eventually got back to work and had another bag of 'stuff' to get rid of. If I haven't used something in a long time I need to move it out.

I found a cheap piece of black plastic that I'd used a few times to make reflections with Still Life. I noticed that my hands actually were reflected when I reached for something.
And then I thought.
I wonder if I could take a photo of the reflection of my hands??

There was enough light coming in through the window to give an eerie glow to portions of my skin.

Remember, this is a reflection of my hands palm up towards the window.

So I liked this in a way because it was so different.

I decided to start trying different things with it. I discarded what I was working on and made my own texture and added text to it.

This was the end result of messing around.
I got to here and stopped.

I sat back and then closed the program.

I was done and the image stuck with me. It invoked something I couldn't quite describe, but it felt right.

It was a good experiment for how I'd felt off an on for the past couple of weeks.