Summer Art Challenge Days 34-35 — making art (of some kind) every day!

I went on a little trip this weekend with Melody the Music Muse; The RabbleBerries were performing on Mayne Island, which involved a puzzle-like loading of the car with instruments, various accessories, personal overnight gear, and finally, musicians. I’m renowned for my ability to fit far more in a car than most people would think physically possible; some people suspect that I have a button on my key fob that turns the car into a Tardis!

We all had a lovely time on the ferry cruise and at our concert; we played for two hours (with a break) to a wonderfully attentive crowd at the Camassia Cafe, a very inviting space with great acoustics, not to mention good food! If you’re ever on Mayne Island, check them out at the Fernhill Centre (pick up a map on the ferry).

I still found room for the iris the Art Muse, though; she squeezed into my camera and kept nudging me throughout the trip. However, my poor little Canon A-700, which until now has been a trusty camera, and with which I have taken a myriad of beautiful photos, is acting up. I suspect a chip problem or a settings problem, but haven’t had time to check. I completely lost several shots that I hoped would be really great, and many others came out uncharacteristically blurry or with very strange profiles on the histogram.

I was disappointed when I got them back and into the computer, but Iris said not to worry, we could at least have some fun playing with them! I started out doing some fiddling in iPhoto, choosing one that had turned out too dark, and seeing if I could get it back to some semblance of what I remembered the scene looking like. Then I started playing with it for some arty effects, using the sliders on the histogram and the colour balances, primarily. I’ve done a couple of series of photos using just the simple adjustments available in iPhoto; you can actually do quite a lot with them in terms of weird effects.

But Iris, ever the experimenter, goaded me into the hard stuff: Photoshop filters. I haven’t played with those much; in fact I use Photoshop far more for artwork than photos. So I have spent an interesting evening poking around in the filter gallery, trying out some different effects, all with the same photo. I learned a lot, and now I want to try some more! There are a lot of controls to fiddle with, and I want to try superimposing various effects on top of each other. I think my art muse has led me astray…

Here’s the original version. I have no idea why it came out so dark; it was a bright sunny day! I knew this had some strong compositional possibilities, so I decided not to give up on it.

Here’s what I got when I simply pushed the exposure up to max. Still kind of dark, but at least there’s something to work with here!

I started pushing around the histogram (the little box with a graph of all the hills and valleys; pretty much all photo programs have these, as do many cameras), and adjusting the colour sliders until I got something I liked. Then I pushed the lessen-the-darkness slider up and all these groovy textures appeared!

Still in iPhoto, I went back to the original photo and tried some different slider play and came up with this poster-y version.

At this point I decided to try Photoshop. This is the coloured pencil filter. I didn’t discover that the filters (at least some of them) are affected by the active colours in the tool sidebar until after I did this; more exploration is needed!

I got bored with doing the whole picture and decided to try some crops. Here’s the top left corner, turned upside down and with “accented edges” applied.

Then I zoomed in on the ferry workers, and tried to make them look painterly. This is “dry brush” which actually looks like an oil or acrylic painting to me.

… and here’s the watercolour filter. I tried it on different sections of the photo with varying levels of effectiveness.