Facebook

Well, I put it off for awhile, but it was finally time to jump in and start swimming.  I've opened a Facebook page for Capirani Photography.  It is listed as Cynthia A. Pirani Photography.  Of course most of you already know that Capirani is simply my initials with my last name.  I think it makes it easier to remember one word than a whole name.  Anyway, the page is up and running.  So if you will please go over there and visit, click the LIKE button and help me get my first 100 likes, I would really appreciate it. 

One of my friends said this gorgeous star above would look awesome on top of a Christmas tree.  She suggested using a 3D printer to make it work.  Having never even seen how those things work, I can only guess at it.  But maybe it would work.  

In the meantime, I've been searching out some new filters for my PSP program so I can make some more interesting artwork.  It's been very interesting to find out what I can do with the new ones.  Many of them were difficult to get loaded into the program because they had so many files inside files inside files.  But all I had to do was to keep following the path and then moving the individual files to the main folder.  That was a bit time consuming but worth it.  The quality of designs I come up with are so much better than what I was doing before.  At least I think so.  Maybe it is just because I was using the old ones for so long.  Take a look at what I did with some photos of cabbage from this past July.  

Announcement: Brand New Website

I am very happy to announce that I now have a website apart from this blog.  You can find it at this link.  I am really impressed with the art organization program at Artsala.  With this program I am able to make a complete and organized inventory of all my photographs, make those photos available to Xanadu Galleries IF I so desire for them to jury to see if they want to represent me (which they already do thanks to this program) and also Artsala will create a website for the artist.  Getting my website set up only took a few minutes last night and by this morning, it was live and ready to share with everyone.  Since then I have been inventorying even more photos and adding them to the website.  Just as quickly as I press the button to save my photo to my inventory, it is added into the proper category on my website.  Nothing could be easier!  I don't have to do my inventory separately from my website.  It is all done in one easy step.

A word about this blog.  For now I have decided to continue with this blog rather than changing locations.  There may be some fine tuning to be done in the near future, however.  Between this blog and the "Page Two" blog that holds even more of my photographs, (you can find a link by clicking the tab at the top of this page) you can find almost all of my best work, as well as my learning experiences, and other photography related topics.

So, now with my new website and my Flickr Photostream you have access to everything I am doing with photography.  As always, please take time to check out the photos I have showing at Xanadu Gallery also. 

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.

Feathers, Shells, and Water Bottles--Say What???

My granddaughter, who is now 12 years old, continually brings me different things to add to my photography portfolio.  Her's too, because she is learning photography from me, and let me tell you that she has a real eye for the art.  This time she brought quail feathers that she got while cleaning at some older couple's home as part of a youth group project.  A few days later she brought two halves of what looks like a clam shell.  Since I haven't looked it up and I am not an expert on these things, I simply call it a mollusk shell.  Where do water bottles fit into this?  Well, let's just say that at first, her turquoise water bottle she was drinking from ended up being a beautiful background for the quail feathers.  But eventually the bottle ended up offering some very interesting macro shots itself.

For the following photos, I used my Canon Rebel EOS T3i with and without my 5 extension tubes.  When I used the extension tubes the images are very, very close and almost have the quality of having looked through a microscope at times.  When I didn't use the extension tubes, you can tell that the images are just close ups, but not extremely close up.  I believe the feathers turned out very beautifully, while the shells are also very pretty.  But when you see what happened with the water bottle, you may be very surprised.

Understand that I did no editing of any kind other than to place my watermark on these copies.  Here are the photos.

You can see in some of the above photos the turquoise showing through from the water bottle.  How to photograph the feathers was at first a problem as I could not really think of any possible way to lay them on a surface and end up with a good photo.  However, I did have a small cut flower vase with an empty green floral sponge inside.  That became the holder for the feathers and also provided a greenish background in some of the photos.

I am really going to have to research mollusk shells to find out what the fossilized circles are on the outside of the shell. To do these photos with the marbles was actually my granddaughter's idea and I was really glad she came up with it.

Okay, so now what is so special about a turquoise water bottle anyway?  Well, when the bottle has its own designs on the side, and it is about half filled with water, and when light hits that bottle in certain ways while it is on its side on a table, you end up with lots of various abstract results.

I really was pleasantly surprised at the bokeh that appeared in this shot above.  I have found that I can create interesting bokeh when light is reflecting off just about anything, as long as whatever that "anything" is turns out to be shiny.

Now I am on the hunt for other interesting objects that can end up either as still life or abstract photography.  Since the water bottle was more accident than anything else, it gives me inspiration that there could be any number of objects around the house, yard, or even at garage sales, that could end up in my portfolio.  What do you think?  Got any ideas of your own?

Flickr and Jason Horejs

Recently I've been uploading my most recent photos and designs to my Flickr Photostream so now you can see some of my best works there.  Since Flickr does not allow using their site for direct selling of photography or other items, you can still contact me by coming here.

The past couple of weeks I have been taking a free online email workshop given by art gallery owner Jason Horejs who owns Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ.  Jason Horejs is also the author of the book Starving to Successful.  So far the e-course has been very interesting and will hopefully teach me things I need to learn to possibly show my photography (and maybe my paintings) in an actual gallery somewhere.  But even if it doesn't, this course is helping me learn more about myself, and that there are many, many others out there striving to do work that someone will someday buy.  I am expecting to learn more about how to present myself and my work in the best possible light I can.

Okay, just a quick example of some of the photography you can see on my Flicker Photostream.