photo app fun continued or get thee to the app store

this is the same photo as yesterday, run through the tiny planet app.  after that, i got a little obsessed. but it was way fun!

swans on our lake.

the lighthouse at blåvandshuk

husband at the north sea

an old german bunker on the west coast of denmark

amber hunter at the north sea - i LOVE the birds in flight.

and here it is flipped the other way in the app. even cooler, don't you think?

a watch tower at sunset on the west coast.

and the same photo played with in the diptic app.

get thee to the app store, i tell you. 

iPhones are a very good thing. 

i wonder if other phones actually still exist?

photo app fun

it's been awhile since i got all excited photographically-speaking, but i just had to share a new app that kristina (who is ALWAYS ahead of the curve on the cool stuff (she was on pinterest before pinterest was all the rage)) turned me on to.  it's called montage. it lets you cut out shapes and layer your photos. it's not entirely intuitive, but it's usable once you get the hang of it.

to do this photo, i used no less than 4 apps - i took and treated the original photo in vintage camera. then i loaded it into montage, along with another photo from a week or so ago - and clipped that photo into a circle. i played with it a bit to get it sized and placed as i wanted it. then i cropped it in photogene and uploaded it all to instagram. a little bit the long route, but worth the fun.  funny, how my old favorite - hipstamatic, isn't even on the radar anymore.  i do still occasionally use camera+.

it's good i discovered this, as my month of iPhone photos only was wearing a bit thin. it's been good for my photo mojo, as i'm ready to go back to the big girl camera come february 1.

what are your favorite photo apps?

the water heater of creativity

last week, i had the opportunity to discuss the mysteries of creativity for an entire afternoon. and i got to pick the brain of a very creative person. who hates to be called that. because there's so much pressure in it, isn't there? and while you can generally be creative, you often don't really have that much control over it. much of what we discussed was about creativity and creative people's place in business and i'll be writing about that elsewhere. but something he said stuck in my head...he said he felt that creativity was like the hot water tap. when you turn on cold water, it's always there, but when you turn on hot, it's there, but eventually it runs out and has to be replenished.

from the great jacabunny photoshoot - by sabin

but the difficulty is in finding one's own inner water heater, isn't it? what is it that recharges you? i watch sabin, who seems to be able to be endlessly and spontaneously creative, all the time. she sees the creative potential in everything around her...from the box the veggies come in to some bits of fabric scraps, to simply taking 1335 (not kidding) photos of our growing kit lane jacabob collection. and she seemingly never needs to stop and recharge.

my inner water heater functions best when i have a change of scenery. i can get very bogged down if i remain in the same physical space for too long. even if that space is home, which is filled with people and cats and bunnies and things i love.  i don't need to go far, i just need to get out. and get new impulses, see new things, eat new food, breathe new air.  last week's winter holiday was just what i needed.

a new work in progress

i can always tell that the hot water of creativity will flow again when i wake up with pictures in my head of things i want to create, or when i can scarcely fall asleep because so many exciting ideas are going through my mind. these last two photos are a hint of the picture that was in my head when i awoke yesterday.

the space ships are coming!

i'm looking for a way to combine the things i love...photography and fabric. there are many, many pretty pictures out there now that everyone has a digital camera, so it's difficult to stand out from the crowd on etsy or big cartel. i think sometimes that the pictures are too pretty in their glossy perfection once you've had them printed, so i wanted to break the integrity of the photo down a little bit. i'm still working on it, but i'll back back later to show you what i mean...i've got to keep going while the water's still hot.

the rain is good for something

when i grow up, i want to be one of the gardeners at legoland. that must be a great job.

thank you all for your thoughtful thoughts on my previous post. i've gotten much less angsty about the whole photo editing thing. as a number of you said, photos have been manipulated since they began, it's actually an integral part of the medium. we're just fortunate to live in a time where we can sit at our computers and do it and not have to putter around in a basement darkroom (tho' one of those appeals as well).

spud brought up an interesting point about it being a bit of a cheat to use someone else's Lightroom presets.  i found myself thinking about that quite a lot of the day. then i realized that i use products of other people's creativity all the time - recipe books, sewing patterns - but what i produce with them ends up something uniquely mine. i see the LR presets as no different than that - after all, the photos i apply them to are my own. at the base of it, i'm a pretty pragmatic person and i don't see any reason to reinvent the wheel. so i thank whoever it was who made that oldskool preset i love so much these days  (tho' most of the flowers above are a new one i found called PH bedtime).

and here's to the beginning of a beautiful week....

rainy day photo manipulation

original - SOOC
those lines you can see are a reflection of the wall behind me in the window that's between me and the rain.

during the time without internet (of which we speak only at a whisper) i had some time to play around a bit more with Lightroom (i'm not so much a photoshop girl, you see, so LR is as close as i come). and although some part of me still feels there's a measure of dishonesty in manipulating the photos, i'll also admit i had a bit of fun. and i learned something about how applying presets (i haven't made my own yet, it's not gone that far) can give a photo a different mood, one which helps you express what you'd like to express with the photo.

this morning, we woke up, once again, to a steady, drizzling, cold rain. it's been cold and dreary for what feels like weeks now and it's just so depressing, even tho' the world is a brilliant green and the flowers are blooming their little hearts out. what i'd like more than anything is to spread a cheery tablecloth on that table out there, get out the chair pillows and serve some cold, refreshing homemade rhubarb fizz. but alas, it's far too cold and rainy for that.

SarahJiDriftwood preset

somehow, this photo treatment makes me feel a bit better about that rainy scene. it has an early 20th century feel to it, like looking out on another time and that somehow makes it better. tho' i still picture sitting out there at the table, with this one, i've got more of a flapper dress on and perhaps a smart beaded headband and i'm definitely smoking a cigarette in one of those elegant holders (and i'm not even a smoker) and sipping a martini. the preset changes the whole mood of the photo and opens a whole new realm of imagination.

Hoddo_blue/yellow preset

this one isn't that far off the original, but it's just far enough that to me it has more depth. the greens are a bit more blue and i feel just that much more longing for the weather to clear and let me sit outside. the darker tones make the table just that much more lonely without me out there. it's closer to what i wanted to express when i took the photo. should i have made these adjustments in camera when i took the shot? perhaps.

what do you think about photo manipulation? is it simply a part of finishing our photos and making them our own? or is it cheating?

kristina wrote about this recently(ish) and you should check her post, as she goes much more into the technical aspects of using Lightroom, as well as asking the "what is real?" question on a more philosophical plane.