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.

Xanadu Gallery Online

I am really excited to announce that I have been accepted for representation by Xanadu Gallery's Online Gallery.  Xanadu Gallery  is owned and operated by Jason Horejs and is located in Scottsdale, Arizona.  You can find my art here. I am looking forward to working with Xanadu Gallery for many years to come.

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?

More Learning

Well, I have to say that doing the tutorial lessons with Jason Horejs is working well, somewhat.  The assignments do require that I buy his book which I have not done yet.  But otherwise I am learning at least a few things.  One of those things is about branding and all that goes with that topic.  So far, I am learning that people need to be able to look at my work and recognize that it is mine.  So what sets me apart from others?  Right off hand I would say that it is my abstracts.  Especially the kaleidoscopes.  That has me thinking that maybe I need to totally remake this blog and the page two section of this blog which is all graphics.  I am just not sure yet how to do that so that it is better, easier to use, and more organized.  It will take a whole lot of time and work because I have very few of the photos on my computer anymore.  They are all on flash drives and CD's.  In the meantime, I am still at work creating new abstracts and taking more and more photos.  I am learning more and more about my Canon EOS Rebel T3i also.  I think I finally know how to change the shutter speed AND the aperture.  That really had me baffled for awhile.

Also, now that I am on Flickr I have been doing some interesting searching using town names of places where I have lived throughout my life.  In doing this, so far, I have met a new friend who went to the same high school as I graduated from, only several years apart so we did not know each other back then.  How interesting!  And how interesting to find photographs from the places I have lived on Flickr!  

Last week, we got a bunch of fresh produce and as I was cooking some fresh from the garden cabbage, I took these photos.  Tonight I also did a few abstracts as well of both the cabbage and some clover that I photographed last month.  Also in the photos this time are some other fresh veggies.

These colorful designs below are from the clover, which, by the way, is actually lavender.  But somehow with the extension tubes on my camera, this is the color they turned out.

On these two below I tried something I had never done before.  I took the original pattern design and then used the color fill in color changer mode, clicked on one small area and this is how it turned out.  Then I added a new color for the final design.

Obviously this must be the cucumber kaleidoscope.  What fascinates me here is how deep this looks.  It is almost 3D.

These below are the green beans in kaleidoscope and patterns.  Very unique, I think.