Silver Gull - making the most of mistakes

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Aloha dear reader and thank you for visiting my blog!!  I am sharing today about a mistake I have made, with a really lovely image, however, I've learned a lot from my mistake, and that's really what I want to share.  After completing a course with Emil Pakarklis through iPhone Photography School, iphonephotographyschool.com I now have a much better understanding about what makes a good iPhone photo.

I took this with my iPhone 5 at the beachfront on a day where the seagulls were being thrown left over takeaways from a picnic, the couple left, but the seagulls stayed behind and were eager for me to feed them too.  Unfortunately that day, I had nothing to give them, but when I motioned upward to the sky with my arm, they would fly off the ground or the perches, in search of the morsel I'd apparently thrown them (as you can imagine, this didn't go on for very long before they realised I was tricking them).  This gave me ample opportunity to shoot in burst mode.  I capture 2 to 3 great shots out of possible 80-100.  So, where did I go wrong?

The first issue I noticed, was that after I cropped this image quite a lot, there was visible grain. I could have used a tripod, to help me avoid shaking, I could have kept the original file and tried cropping it less severely, and I also could have tried some other techniques in turning it to black and white, using filters that cause less problems with resolution and compression of the file when saving it, I could have re-edited it a number of different ways also, and chosen the best possible one with the least grain.  Doing these things would have resulted in a larger image file, (as this is less than 1MB) and possibly less grain.  I could also have set exposure onto the overexposed eareas on his head and wing, to make them less overexposed, before I took the shot, by setting exposure first.  I also could have taken the photos in the native amera app which has a faster burst mode than the app I use called Camera+

Instead of deleting the photo completely, I found it still sitting in my Dropbox last night, and it really is a lovely photo, I wasn't able to just dispose of it altogether, so despite feeling a bit upset that it's really not something good enough to print out on it's own, I've realised that it might be something valuable that I can keep and use later on, as I'm about to undertake another course, this time through Bob Weil who was iPhoneographer of the Year by IPPA.  This course is about using parts of photos to make another complete image, they are called composites.  So, all is not lost and this photo could still be valuable if used as part of another piece, rather than just on it's own where the quality issues might show too much.

So, I thought I'd share it with you, after applying some texural overlays and filters, I think the grain now looks a little less noticeable and I get away with it ....just!

Thank you for reading, please feel free to share my post on your favourite social network platform and visit my art gallery at redbubble, and photo galleries at EyeEm, Instagram and Tumblr and my print shop and follow me on Facebook and Twitter,  to follow my journey see  more of my paintings, photography, drawings, writing, etc. at the links below.

Have a beautiful aloha day full of creativity my friends!

The Joy of Experimentation: iPhone Olloclip Macro Photography

Aloha dear reader and welcome to my blog!

As you can see, I've been very busy taking iPhone macro photos of my latest favourite thing, glycerol!!!  Thanks to a lovely friend pointing me in this direction, I've been experimenting, and if you were to see me now, you would think I was surely a mad professor.   I have been so excited about this whole new adventure, I seem to barely sleep, eat or breathe....which are all necessary for living...!!!

I hope you like these, they are just a few of my favourites.  I'm sure you'll be curious as to how these were taken and want to know a little more, so I thought I'd share a little bit about how these were captured.

How these effects were achieved.

1. I experimented here with a tall glass tumbler, inside it I stuffed some colourful wool.  On the outside of the glass, I used a glass eyedropper to apply some glycerol and let it drip.  With Camera+ I set the mode to 'burst' and took a series of images while the drip was moving down the glass. I purchased glycerol at my local pharmacy for about AUD$7.  What you see here is the wool fibre being 'reflected' or shown through the glycerol.  Not sure that reflection is quite the right word.

2. Next up, we have what is actually a leaf stalk held upside down, with a drop of glycerol applied to it.    In the background, you can't see anything, because I've masked it out in Filterstorm app, using the black and white mask, only partially, over the background area, I removed all the background, using a stylus pen with a rubber tip.  To create the decorative effects, I transferred the image in Procreate for iPad and worked with the stylus pen and brushes in the app, to create this rather lovely fresh pattern, underneath the stalk wasn't all that attractive so here I just tried to beautify it for aesthetic reasons.  You'll see in image #3 why, the stalk just isn't all that pretty.  The reflection this time is a ball of wool or wool fibre that was very colourful.

3. Same as 2, except in the reflection we have blue raffia/dried grass like stuff you buy from the local $2 shop in the craft section.  I thought it was a neat effect, so voila!!!  I hope you like it!  The blue in the background, is of course, the blurred raffia.  When you take photographs with the olloclip macro lens, it automatically blurs the background, so what you see here, is edited slightly but not much really, just cropped and a little brightened and contrasted in Filterstorm.

4. this one is again, the stalk of a dried leaf that blew into my backyard from a neighbouring tree.  I don't know what the name of it is sorry about that, I must ask my neighbour to identify it for me.   The tip has a blob of glycerol, which is an oily clear substance, and works well for shine and is sometimes a little bit heavier and more stable (and shiny) than water.  I also love using water.  I've altered the colours ever so slightly in Filterstorm, I am not sure, but I don't think anything was being reflected deliberately this time.

5. This was fun to create!!  I got some dried water paints that were about $2 for the set, I wet them and when semi dry, I gouged some out and applied them to the glycerol drop, which this time I sat on a mirrorred surface which is how the reflection of the glycerol comes about, and in the background, I set up an old colourful paint palette, which had leftover dried paint on it, so that it too would add to the reflections being cast.

6. Lastly this is a glycerol drop also, but this time, I placed the glycerol directly onto an old paint palette covered in dried paint, here I dropped it right on top of some silvery gold pigment and later I did edit this quite a lot, using filterstorm and filterstorm neue, to add colour and foreground, while subtracting a lot of the background to make the drop pop.

Thanks for visiting my blog, I am looking forward to sharing with you more often!!

Have a wonderful aloha day, please feel free to share my blog posts with a link back to me here, on your favourite social media platform and visit my other links, especially my art gallery and print shop at redbubble www.redbubble.com/people/karin and like my FB and Twitter pages if you'd like to keep updated and watch my journey unfold!

Karin

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Partial to Water Drops

Guys, hello there.  Hope you're having a great day out there!  As it happens, I am a little bit partial to water drops, water in general, any body of it, anywhere, anytime, yes I'm a sucker for that clear, liquidy stuff, that comes in all hues of blue, green and everything else in between.

This fascination with water has led to less partiality and more all consuming passion, with water drops, reflections in water drops, water drops on plants, insects, all kinds of surfaces and especially dried and used up acrylic paint palettes.   So this is where I'm coming from today, this image before you, is actually a drop of H2O yes, it's just water as clear as crystal from a syringe (less the needle bit on the end).  No tricks were employed here, just natural lighting, and an old paint palette, with some dried up acrylic on it.  I simply dropped a water drop, right on top of what looked like a miniature scene going on, got out my olloclip macro lens, and presto, voila!!  Something new, exciting and certainly different and unexpected emerged from the shot.  To me, it doesn't look like a water drop at all, it looks more like the paint has just been sort of plonked there, now you get different results every which way you turn the paint palette, so is it any wonder I'm hooked, I've collected ten or so paint palettes and old brushes, so that should keep me busy photographing for days, until the sunshine comes out to play and I can return to my first love, nature, insects and naturally formed rain drops and dew drops on leaves and stuff.  I hope you enjoy this one in the meantime.  More coming your way soon!

Aloha from Karin x

Oh yeah and ps, a pretty cool thing happened to me the other day, Olloclip, yes! Olloclip noticed my photos and actually featured one of my worn pencils on Instagram. Thank you Olloclip.com for giving me access to the most wonderful invention of all, the Olloclip macro lens, it's changed the way I look at my world!

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Welcome to my blog

Welcome to my blog, it's wonderful to see you!  I hope you're having a great day.

I began this blog to record and share my experiences as an iPhone photographer.  My journey with iPhone Photography began not all that long ago really, it started to become a lot more important to me once I had a macro lens and could see the world up much closer.  Since then (perhaps 12 months ago) I've photographed numerous things, all out of curiousity and my love for experimentation.  I'm excited to begin a blog and start to share more of my experiences with you.

I also look forward to sharing about the iPhone apps I use and discover, poetry that I sometimes write to accompany my photographs, talking about the equipment I use, my muse which is nature and sharing my photos with a wider audience. I look forward to getting to know you and walking the journey together.

Tibouchina Bud with natural bokeh in background. Equipment used, iPhone 5,
Olloclip Macro 4-in-1 lens 10x, iPhone apps (Camera+, Filterstorm Neue, Glaze).
Shot in a neighbouring front garden, north east coast Australia.

It's our winter now, but the flowers are still blooming, we have some Autumn colours entering our field of vision, here and there, you see golds and tawny browns, and beautiful reds, mixed in with some still vibrant violets, pinks, blues and yellows that seem to be left over from the late Summer and continuing warm weather we've had so far.  The skies are blue, and then it rains, we are having extremes, lots of thunderstorms mixed with hot and cold weather, so one really doesn't know from one minute to the next what the weather will be like, it's incredibly changeable.  I am enjoying watching the gardens as the seasons change, this is my first year of truly absorbing what's going on around me and it's really interesting to note that a lot of the bugs and beetles, caterpillars and butterflies that were everywhere, are now more sparse and difficult to find, it seems they have been replaced with your common garden variety of fly.  Still, I'm keeping on the lookout for anything new and if I find it, you can be sure I'll be sharing it with you here.

This is what is so exciting, I am almost 50 and am still seeing something new each time I go out.  Today I noticed what looked like insect spit, and I also saw some gorgeous drops of water on red velvety leaves, I couldn't get a photo of this, as the light was too poor.  I'll go back again another day and revisit that garden to see if it's possible to photograph that beautiful image so I can share it with you.

I had the privilege today also of meeting two of the people in my neighbourhood, a lovely gentleman and nice lady who were slightly curious as to what I was doing in their bushes, I often find myself reassuring people that it's fine, I'm just photographing bugs. I've had various reactions, some think I'm suffering from a mental disorder, others (like my new friends today) began searching for bugs to help me and wanted to see my photos, and still others have thought I must be physically ill, as they've seen me all bent over or curled up in a ball on the grass, and apparently I must look like I am in the throws of a hangover or something, everyone's being very understanding though, and perhaps it's a good thing (the curiousity) as I get to meet people I would never normally meet, even though I've lived in this street for almost 20 years, I know barely a soul, but I think that's all about to change!  So don't be a stranger, stop and say hello!  Please feel free to share my blog and journals on your favourite form of social media.

aloha from Karin x


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