Ha ha, in my last post I said I wasn’t doing much post processing these days and so of course the next thing I did was this! That always happens to me. I have to be careful about what I say because as soon as I decide something, I want to do the opposite. Are you like that?
Alpine Meadows California and The Rule of Thirds
My focus right now is composition. I’m not doing much if any post-processing. I’ve been experimenting with the Rule of Thirds as described in this outstanding article: Two Seconds to Better Photos by Michelle W.
I like how those turned out, but sometimes during my photo shoot walk, I grew frustrated and just put the subject in the middle. I love the knot hole in this dead tree.
Here’s the same tree from a different angle, obeying the rule of thirds, at least a little more.
I do prefer the composition of the second photo.
Here’s another one where I just wanted the subject in the middle. I call it, Standing Tall.
And last but not least, I loved the majestic mountain and the sky at this moment. I think the rule of thirds wouldn’t work with this, but I don’t know. I like that big peak right where it is.
2013 retrospective part 2
As I said yesterday, through my daily blog I discovered or re-discovered my enjoyment of the arts. In looking back I discovered that I seek out art when I’m traveling.
New York is a gold mine for art.
Paris is amazing:
And Amsterdam is heaven for art lovers, too:
I didn’t go inside any museums in Australia. I would like to do that some day, but I didn’t need to go inside to find art there:
Tomorrow is new year’s eve in the United States and I’ll do my final post of the year about the people I’ve met through blogging and what I’ve learned from others through blogging.
2013 retrospective
Leanne Cole inspired me to use the waning days of 2013 to reflect upon the year. I want do this, particularly since this was my first year of blogging.
I do have one more award to post, but I’m going to do that on January 5, on my blogging anniversary.
I know that my blogging style has changed since I started. When I first started, I tried being edgy.
- Five Reasons Not to Take Up Skiing
- Looks sweet but bites: skiing Alpine Meadows today
- Slavery Sucks… but Machu Picchu is Breathtaking
Because I blog every day, though, the “real me” came out quickly and I settled into a pattern of… the arts, I guess. Photography, digital art, book reviews, poetry. In that order, really. Well, travel too, certainly, but I think after I get the photos up from the travels, I like to settle in and spend some time working with the images artistically.
- Ravenswood, Queensland Australia
I’ll post tomorrow about other ways that I think my interest in art came out through blogging. Then I’d like to talk a bit about the people I’ve met through blogging and what I’ve learned from others through blogging.
Cultivated versus wild flowers 2
In yesterday’s post, I showed these three flowers for comparison. Here they are again as paintings. Which do you prefer? Cultivated or wild? Painting or photo?
Cultivated versus wild flowers
I’m going to do two posts, one post with the macro photography, unaltered from the camera, and another post with digital art applied to the same photos.
A painting from Barker Pass, near Tahoe
This took a few hours. The software wasn’t making a good painting out of one of the wildflowers pictures. Finally I did one on Corel Painting Essentials 3 Defaults, then restored detail to the foreground. The restore detail doesn’t seem to be working right in the other painting types. I thought it was just me, but when, with the defaults setting, restore detail started working as shown in the demo video, I concluded there’s something off with the other programs. Anyway, this is art, so I’m not going to worry about precision. I wanted it kind of loose anyway.
I spent a lot of time in Paris making canvases out of photos. I would run one of the painting programs but stop it before it finished. Then I would smear it and then save it as jpg, then use that as a canvas for a digital painting.
With that in mind, I tried making the painting of the wildflowers and opening that in GIMP. Then I opened another Barker Pass photo, one that had just shale rocks in the foreground. I pasted it and then fiddled with the transparency using Color to Alpha. I have no idea what that means. I didn’t bother to look it up because I like how the visually simple rocks in the foreground let the flowers come through and the flowers look like rain, while the smeary background in the wildflowers picture made for a textured sky.
Something different
There have been a lot of snow pictures in the blogosphere lately, so here is something from summer. I took this in 2011 near Barker Pass in the high Sierra above Lake Tahoe. That was a very heavy, late winter and the snow persisted through July. The late melt fed the wildflowers into an opus of Nature, like she’d come out to show the competition that we humans can never compete! Oh, the Keukenhof Gardens (see posts under Keukenhof Gardens on my Travel page), arguably come close, but even they can’t cover hundreds of miles with this:
A white Christmas in Squaw Valley
I’m quite excited because Leanne Cole is going to feature my Christmas photos on her blog today. If you want to have your Christmas photos shown on her blog, send them to her. I think she’s doing them on Mondays between now and Christmas. Note, Monday her time is Sunday, for those of us in the U.S.
Plus, if you want to see some beautiful photos of what they are doing in Melbourne right now for the holidays, you must check out her blog. It’s gorgeous and sure to put a smile on your face. This post of the light show on town hall is amazing:
Thanks to Leanne’s offer to post photos, I was motivated to get my husband to drive me over to Squaw Valley today. (He’s good at snow driving.)
First we went to The Village at Squaw Valley, a Tyrolean style complex with all the common areas and restaurants outside. It was super cold, so I was glad we went here first.
Because then we could go to The Resort at Squaw Creek, where we could enjoy their beautiful decorations while inside the cozy hotel. I loved the real pine trees outside the windows, contrasting with the decorated trees inside.
The gingerbread houses with the toy train running around it are amazing.
As we were leaving, I snapped this shot of the entry way. I like how they have the bell and the wreath and I loved that my camera picked up the snow flakes.
The hostess said they close down the hotel three weeks while they decorate! But surely they don’t close down everything? I don’t know, but the decor is everywhere.
This is looking out from Sandy’s Pub across the ice skating rink:
Third snow! Alpine Meadows, 9/26/13
Nicci Carrera 