Texture Photos and Braided Mandela

Above is my latest mandala. I am not sure what to call this, I used Celtic braiding techniques for some of the design elements but I also used other designs. I rather like the colors I used here.  I find it interesting the way colors can modify each other when they are placed together. The green band on top of the orange really disguises the orange background. I finished it over the weekend and am now at a bit of loose ends. Not sure what the next project is going to be, but I am fairly sure I am not quite finished exploring the possibilities of the mandala.

The next images I have for you are from my Photography class. I have to turn in 4 photos this Thursday, so far I have narrowed down my selection to the following 5 photos. Not sure which one will be the odd man out. Comments are welcome.

The goal for the assignment was an exploration of texture and light. I chose as my subject for most of my pictures a glass bowl that I have had forever, in it I have a collection of marbles and small glass floats. The marble on top of the stack is a hand-blown glass marble that I purchased at the local Brockton museum a few years ago when they had a marble exhibit. I managed to take the photos one morning during a brief period of sun. I had to move quickly to get them as I had to go to a class, but I rather like how they came out. I have a southeast facing window which was perfect for giving me the light I needed for the photos. I placed the bowl on a sheet of white foam board and tried to photograph the bowl from different angles. The shadows are from a couple of my many plants, one hangs in the window and the other sits on the floor.

My 5th photo is a view of some blooms on one of my Christmas Cactus taken with another Christmas Cactus in the foreground. The focus point for this one was the stem of the foreground plant. I took a couple of others with different focus points. This is the one I like the best.  Let me know which ones you like.

Playing with Photoshop

I think my Photography class is finally going to get serious. So far we have just been more or less reading about important aspects of photography, shutter speed, aperture size, depth of field, focus, and trying to learn about our personal cameras and how those aspects affect our photographs. Next week we have an assignment to photograph textures, and print a contact sheet of about 20 photo's. The following week we will print in a larger format 4 of those photos and create an artist statement to go with them as to what we were trying to show in our images - I may not have what is to be in the statement quite correct but... close. Should be interesting.

So far we have not spent much time learning or using Photoshop, we have opened it up and done some playing around to see what certain features are, but no real work with it. One of the things we were doing was to use Photoshop to create a HDR photo. A HDR photo is a composite image that combines 4 different photo's into one image. It is used in certain lighting situations, such as an interior where the interior is lit but you can't see anything outside the window. The photographer takes (usually) 4 pictures with different exposures see my examples below.

As you can see the first one is overexposed, the 2nd slightly overexposed, the third I would consider a normal exposure, and the last is underexposed. Note in the underexposed image the sky is blue and you can see the tip of a tree out the window. Below is the HDR image as I adjusted it. I am sure that someone with more experience could get a better result, but hopefully you will get the idea of what this technique can do.

This last photo of the jade plant was taken with a flash. Note that there is no detail outside the window and the yellow curtains are very washed out.

 

None of the first four photos used a flash. I had the camera mounted on a tripod so I could have longer exposures without shake. For those with Photoshop who would like to try this the menu options are FILE - AUTOMATE - MERGE TO HDR, you get a screen where you have to select the photos to be merged, it is easier if you have them already open in Photoshop. After Photoshop does the merge, you can make adjustments to the image, when you are happy you can save it.

I have 3 more photos to show, first one is of some trees at what I would consider a normal exposure, the 2nd is a rather overexposed image, but with the snow on the trees I though made an interesting pattern. I brought that photo into Photoshop, did some cropping, then using the Image, Adjustments, Hue and Saturation sliders I changed the colors of the trees, making them green, blue, and a purple. I keep thinking there should be a way for me to use this in a quilt, I know print it on fabric first - but it is what I do with it afterwards that I am still pondering. 

 

Any suggestions will be welcomed. That is it for this post. I Will hopefully have some more drawings next week.

Nature Drawing #4

I meant to do this update yesterday, but with one thing and another I hadn't gotten the next exercise for my Nature Drawing finished. So I drew it last night. The subject is one of my house plants, a relatively small Jade plant that I started from a cutting last year. The exercise that I was supposed to be doing was the plant study drawing, but I think I will consider it as the studies for the next two exercises also, proportion and shape, and foreshortening as I had to do both with this plant. I did one detail sketch, a gesture drawing, and one that is more or less from memory.

Jade plant detail

The gesture drawing is on the left, and the memory drawing on the right

I may not have gotten to the book exercise until Sunday, but I have been doing other sketches. To continue with some animal studies I was working last week from chipmunk photo's. You can see an example of what I was doing below, one page out of the couple I did.

What was keeping me away from the drawing pad was trying to do some clean up/de-cluttering around my apartment. Like many I have way too much stuff. Toward the end of last week I decided that it was time to try and get all my beading supplies put away. I haven't been beading since last summer so really there was no reason for them to be out and about cluttering up my living space. There were also some magazines that it was time to go through, glean what I though would be useful in the future and then get out of the apt. In doing this I found an image of a CA fox which I used for this drawing.

I think all my dog sketching helped do this guy.

I also spent some time working on the sea gull drawing, it is coming along but not quite ready for display. My next Nature Drawing exercise is to draw a flower. I am either going to have to go raid someones garden, buy some flowers in the grocery store or pick something in a field. Course I suppose I could always draw my one of the miniture cycliman blooms. I have a red minture cycliman plant that is blooming like mad. Hard to believe now that when I purchased this plant it looked like it was dying. They had neglected the poor thing at the store where it was being sold. I was able to get it at a discount, but look at it now.

That's it for today's post. My goals for the week are to work on my Challenge quilts, (I am way behind) draw my flower exercise, and work on some more finished drawings. Everyone have a good week, and don't forget that comments are welcome.