yellow moon

i have been trying to write about the yellow moon for about a week now.  first time was an issue, i was just really busy with work and family.  then my poor computer was broke, so that cost me a couple days.  well now i have a bit of extra time to talk about the moon.   the other nite on my way home from work there was an excellent full moon out that was completely yellow.  it was a little eerie and spooky, but i loved it.  i looked up online about why it's yellow and here are some of the answers i found.

~the moon certainly appears to be yellow at times, and sometimes it will also look a brilliant white or silver, or orange and reddish. It depends on how clear our atmosphere is and what angle it is being viewed from earth. In reality, the moon is mostly shades of the one color - an ashen gray. The sunlight reflects from it and casts shadows on the low areas which appear to us as a darker color than the rest.

~It was said that a strange color of moon (if not normally as it was) giving signs of atmospheric changes that may affect the season's shiftings or weather.

      In more scientific way of explaination is found in this link..

      Colors of the moon..

      http://www.atalaia.org/filipe/moon/colorofthemoon.htm 

      i looked up the above link and looked over it a little, very interesting. 

alas i am not located in the desert, but this is the best picture i found.  and i also found out that when people mention harvest moon or hunter's moon, the color their referring to is a red...the moon is reddish.

yesturday's today

i wanted to write something about the harvest moon we had a few nights ago, but the thought has left me.  so i'm just going to show you another digital imaging progression.

here's the original, from a state park in pennsylvania.

here's the colors bumped up a little.

here's the saturation turned down.

here's purple foliage with a gray vignette.

 contrast turned up and saturation turned up a little.

cropped to an 8x10.

enjoy

blah for today, but hooray for the......

today was beautiful here.  the sun was out, it was warm but not too warm, nice breeze, and the occasional cloud.  i was inside all day on the computer.  i finished a new photo.  i don't have a tutorial on it but i can show you the consecutive jpgs until i got the end result.  this is a new idea i'm working with, trying to get all the kinks out, but for a first attempt i thought it came out ok.

ok, here's the original photo.  nice, cool train track scene.  love the curve in it and the water too.  i remember this day, i was pissing around waiting to pick someone up from work...pretty sure it was my brother.  any who, this is after i adjusted levels and colors and things.

this one the colors are much more bright and rich and vibrant.  i like it this way better.  so i tried to just crop it and see how it looked.  this is what happened.

totally different picture, right.  i like this one too.  more emphasis on the tree line that the tracks.  till nice proportions and good flow i think.  but now i wanted it to look vintage.  something like a crumpled map came to mind first, or the wild west or something along those lines.  so this is what i came up with.  i also had some ideas while i was at work to make it look better.  but after i'm done with this blog i'm done with the computer tonite.  ok, here the grand finale.

ok, here it is.  i think it turned out ok.  looks vintage, wild west, crumpled map.

enjoy!

Johannes Itten

i'm rereading a book called 'the elements of color', a shorten version of 'the art of color' published in germany in 1961.  itten devoted his life to fine arts, mostly exploring color and the different things color can do.  he was a master at the bauhaus school.  he also was into mysticism which is where he gained his inspiration for his work.  if you know of this man, this is probably how you know of him:

the color wheel.  by the time your out of high school if you have an interest in art you are familiar with the color wheel.  well itten is the one who, not invented it, but built on it tremendously.   so i'm reading his book and came upon a couple interesting quotes, i thought i'd share them with you...

"doctrines and theories are best for weaker moments.  in moments of strength, problems are solved intuitively, as if of themselves."

"only those who love color are admitted to its beauty and immanent presence. It affords utility to all, but unveils its deeper mysteries only to its devotees."


these were my favorite.

Photoshop magic

hello everyone.  i have come up with a sort of tutorial, or should i say me meandering through a project with little extras to show you guys some of the capabilities of photoshop.  this is not a detailed point by point tutorial....maybe this isn't even a tutorial at all, oh dear.  but rather, oh why must i rattle on??       ok, you remember the lovely picture of the little log cabin in the post before.  it had lots of potential, right??  well the first thing i did was bring the raw format of the picture into photoshop. 

raw file format is absolutely amazing, you can really control everything about the image your working with.  i felt this picture was flat, the colors, so i decided to go in and change them a bit.  so this is me a little further along in the process.

the change of color, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation is very apparent.  i just kept messing with it until i liked how it looked.  i have a tendency to go with very bright and contrasty pictures when i'm done with them, some say the mark of an amateur, but of course i beg to differ.  anyways, with the changes i made i would say it could stop here and be a beautiful photograph.  

the top left hand corner bothers me, i tried to adjust it as much as i could get away with, but for now it has to due.  next i decided to crop the image to add interest and excitement to it, well as much excitement as you can to an old log cabin.  like my little joke? 

boy i wish i had a wide angle lens, but that is another discussion.  now that it's cropped it looks much more interesting as in not so much dead space.  now it really can be done.  but something else to think about....if you want to crop a picture in some weird dramatic dimensions, remember, if you plan on framing it things might get difficult.  now i had another picture i really liked, so i made all my color, brightness, etc, changes and decided that picture maybe needed a log cabin.

so this is that.  i looked up some different ideas to do this, which were all not quite what i was looking for, so i just did it the way i knew how to.  i think it turned out alright.  pretty realistic.  now for the last of me goofing off with these images i went all crazy cool.  i always go towards the blues and purples, which i have no idea why, but this is what happened.

i played around with layer masks, one of my best friends, and some paint brushes.  finally i cut out some birds from another picture and put them in here. 

so that lays this photograph for rest for awhile.  

till next time

bye

bike ride and good pictures

hello everyone,


i went for a bike ride last week and brought my camera.  it was a good thing i did because i found this old log cabin that someone restored.  you couldn't see it from the road, how i found it was i stopped to take a break and some pictures of this wonderful field i found.  when i walked down the hill this cabin was down there as well.  i was so excited about it.  i told a friend at work that knows alot about the area and said that back in the 1920's that little log cabin i found used to house the schoolteachers.  he went on talking about another house a little down the road used to be the schoolhouse for the children in the area.  i was totally amazed.  a family bought the property and the cabin a couple years ago and restored it.  so it turned out to be an excellent trip for me.

here's a copy of the original picture i took.  i'm going to take it on the computer and 'fix' the image how i like it.  right now the colors are a little flat, but not in a good way, and it seems like it's lacking in overall interest.  so that is what i'm going to try to fix.  when i'm done i'll post a copy of the finished piece, so people can see how a photograph can be transformed from a little dull into a fine art picture.  well that's all for now.  till then.....

oh and one more thing.  i think i have a new interest....tshirt shredding!!  i practiced on one of my old tshirts and it actually came out really good.  looks like a trip to good will is going to be in my future for more practice shirts.  

bye for now....

my new little project

ok, so i've been working on homemade chenille pillows, like i make the chenille.  i am going to be posting a tutorial about my process soon.  i'm pretty excited, this is going to be my first tutorial.  it will include pictures and everything.  my computer has had a nasty virus that kept me from the internet for a little over a week.  very stressful, but my brother is a computer nerd and he fixed her all up.  thank you thank you thank you!!!  

 so hopefully in the next week or so i will have my first tutorial posted. 

till then.............here is a photo i've been working on.  i have yet to add it to etsy.  i kinda like this blog because i can put up my pieces i'm not sure about or haven't finished yet.  there is still a record of them out there on the net.  pretty cool.  

but anyways, i past this hay wagon taking the kids to the park a couple months ago.  on the way home i stopped the car and ran around someone's farm a little to snap the picture.  i went behind the garage/barn thing and there were bulls with the most beautiful horns, but my car with the kids was out of my sight and the bulls were a little scary.  so unfortunately i didn't capture them on film.  i like this picture.   i figured out how to make the image look like it's about twenty years old.  i like the look, and if anyone out there is actually keeping up with my very random and sparse blog tell me what you think.

finally here's my digital work that isn't done yet.  i still want to add some words and i'm not really sure what else yet.   when working with whatever i want i always tend to stay towards the cool colors.  i want to give myself a challenge and try a monochromatic piece of work.  maybe all in browns or something.  it will be hard for me to do, but something different.


one last comment.  when i work in illustrator my files always end up so very, very big.  and i absolutely hate waiting for them to rasterize.  jeez i would like to kick computer now.  lol


well here it is, so if anyone is actually keeping up with my meanderings i would really like an honest opinion on this one.


oh yeah, my alias is maude.