Creating the Abstract

Have you ever thought about what you can do with photos that don't turn out just the way you wanted them to?  What you will find in this post is how to take steps to make your blurry or other shots you don't really like to make them into something really cool.  Once I found out how to do this, I stopped deleting bad photos until I figured out if I can create something else with them.  This is how Capirani Photography gets the abstract look.  Once you have done this a few times and get the hang of it, you can use your photos as backgrounds for all sorts of things like Twitter, your own website, scrapbook pages, and more.  

The first thing I do is to take some pictures.  They can be of anything, really, but the more colors you include in the pictures, the better.  I've even used pictures of myself, my hair, and other strange things to get the results you will find in the different tabs at the top of this blog.  I've even taken bad pictures on purpose just because there were interesting color combinations available.  

So, for this example, I took some macro shots of a green winter scarf I have along with a bit of brown specialty yarn of the same type the scarf was made of.  The appeal to use these were that the colors went together very well, and the interesting stringy look, along with the sparkles in the yarn.  Here are just a few of the photos of the yarn to start.

 This one above doesn't offer a whole lot of color but the strands of yarn make the possibility of coming out with an interesting abstract appealing.  The photos below are various shots I took of the two colors together.  Now comes deciding which photo I want to use. 

First we will look at what happens when we play around with the all brown yarn photo.  

 One of my favorite things to start out with is to make a kaleidoscope.  I use Corel Paint Shop Photo Plus X5 to create my art.  This is one of the results when I started out with a kaleidoscope.  There are multiple settings you can use with this program no matter which effect you choose.

 I also like the polar distortion which you see here below.  From there I may try other filters to see what happens.

 Of course I had to try another kaleidoscope.  What beautiful results came out of a simple photograph of yarn! 

The last photo above was what I ended up with after taking the polar distortion shot through some more filters. Let's try something totally different.  Here I took a photo of a small snow globe from St. Louis.  

Here I simply flipped the same photo over so that the elements were on opposite sides.  Notice the differences?  One that really stood out to me was the very slight bit of green paint on the corner of the photo from the table the snow globe was sitting on. 

 Some other snow globe shots where I photographed only the bubbles at the top of the globe turned out pretty nice, especially after I doctored the colors a bit. 

 

  It's fun to play around with the program to see what happens.  Sometimes I don't get anything really spectacular, but often I get something special, such as I did with these.  Be sure to click the link above to find more of my latest photos at Flickr.  And don't forget to check out my art at Xanadu Gallery.