Valley Frame and Fine Art: Many different apps and layers

Three layered images with all images shot in "Hipstamatic" layers blended in "Juxtaposer" and texture applied in "Iris" and "PhotoForge" with a touch of "Rays" to add some more light in the lamp.

Last night I gave a 2 hour presentation on composition, light and creativity in photography...at Penn Camera in Tyson's Corner. I had a full class of photographers anxious to learn; How fun is that! I added a few iPhone images just before the presentation and the group was amazed, as I am, every time I make pictures with this technology.

The group of iPhone created and processed images you see here, were made at Valley Framing and Fine Art in Maryland. "Valley" has been in business for three decades. I first came to "Valley" when I was traveling to and from New York for business. I was purchasing some old Vanity Fair prints and some French Fashion prints from the Old Print Shop. Each time I traveled I always stopped into the Old Print Shop to look at what they had in stock. I wanted a quality framing for them and Valley Framing was the place I took my prints to for fabulous framing, that worked with the prints and my home decor.

My friend Annette, I met at Valley and over the years we have developed a wonderful friendship. I even got her to join the Baltimore Camera Club! She shares a love for the Delaware beaches, the Maryland countryside, art, photography, and cars. I was there the other day just dropping in to say hi as I was in the area. She has home decor items there as well and I enjoy their style. So before I left I wandered around the shop making some images on the fly. This weekend I am heading to the beach to open up the beach house and get ready for my beach workshop next weekend....its not too late to sign up if you want a weekend get away.......check it out here for details and registration:
http://blog.karenlmessickphotography.com/p/delaware-photo-ramble-and-workshop_19.html

Captured with iCameraHDR "PicGrunger" and "Iris" added texture

Hipstamatic Salvador Lens Dream Canvas Film

The "Real Gold Frames"

Repeat post from my "Rays" post but also made in the Valley Frame and Fine Art shop.

Juxtaposer App: Creative Layers Opportunity

The Little Dancer

 

 Starting with The Little Dancer, the image is two images blended and arranged in Juxtaposer. Here are the two images, so you can get a frame of reference.

It was a very busy weekend for me, Saturday morning I had the field shoot for the first group of Spring Hopkins students, and it was great, but pretty cold. Saturday night I attended a fabulous Indian dinner at one of the Baltimore Camera Club member's home to benefit Leukemia...and Sunday morning I was up at 4:30am and on my way to Annapolis to conduct a workshop for Penn in the morning...later Sunday afternoon I met a father~daughter team of photographers at the Howard Rawlings conservatory and conducted a three hour private lesson. Needless to say I was a pretty tired camper on Sunday night ~ But I was working on some iPhone images I had made at the BMA and Conservatory using the app Juxtaposer. I enjoy layering images and I have been working with the iPhone apps Iris for blending, Blender for blending and Filterstorm, but I have found Juxtaposer to have some great options for creative images. So I will explain some processes I have used to create the images you see here.

Tropical

 Tropical is a blend of four images: I made several renditions of the original fern leaf image for layering in Juxtaposer.  Each layer was then selectively erased or added to achieve the desired layer, before saving and adding on the next layer.

 

The Garden Bronze below is a blend of two images one positioned over the other, resized in Juxtaposer with no opacity reduction, and arranged.

Garden Bronze

Here are the two images that made this one image:

Baltimore Museum of Art: iPhone inspiration

This was a small posy bowl on my dinner table, the light was beautiful on it and cast a wonderful shadow on the table cloth. It was shot with the Hipstamatic App Chunky and processed with ArtistaOil: and PhotoFX with a Cranberry spot grad filter with reduced opacity to tint the lower  left corner of the image while leaving the posy bowl in neutral tones.

Yesterday, it was pretty gray and cold in Baltimore, a perfect day for a museum visit. The BMA has a pretty cool exhibit of photography entitled "Seeing Now" photography since 1960 and I went downtown to view the exhibit. After walking through the exhibit I spent the afternoon walking the galleries of the 2nd floor exhibits, viewing paintings up close from Manet, Picasso, VanGogh and oh so many more, too many to name, but suffice it to say their collection is broad and wonderful. I love studying the textures and strokes on the canvas of the Impressionist masters. Today I went back, and made a few photos inside...as I studied further some images that were of interest to me. I often feel like a photo image is just the beginning of a work, like a sketch almost, to be enhanced, in the digital darkroom and may I coin it digital "art room". Maybe I am a frustrated painter after all, but I love making images. In this blog there are several images I was inspired to create as a result of my visit to the BMA.

This scene caught  my eye without a person in the image, as I made two exposures a guard walked into the scene and one of the two exposures caught his silhouette. Luck!

This is a layered image. I shot two images: One a reflection of a statue on the marble floor only, and then "The Little Dancer" in one of the museum galleries.  The dancer image was carefully composed so that she was placed between two paintings hanging on the wall behind her. When I blended the two images in an app called Juxtaposer, I then moved the Little Dancer image to the lower left corner of the marble floor reflection image, and carefully painted out and painted in pieces of the Little Dancer image to get the effect I wanted. After that I ran the image through VintageScene app and Iris for levels and texture surface Sandstone. (all this processing was done on the iPhone!)

The hallway in the BMA that houses magnificent mosaic tile works from the 5th century. There were no rays of light coming through the windows, I added them with the App Rays. The image was toned in MonoPhix App.

Happiness... it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Vincent Van Gogh

Autostitch App and the Cylburn Mansion House

Panorama's with the iPhone are lots of fun to make and I have been playing with the technique, honing into one I like best. The image here of the Cylburn Mansion House was made by combining 64 individual images I made hand held. Crazy right!? Well, I made the shots in BracketMode which gave me two shots of each section of the building, one exposed for the highlight and one exposed for the dark areas. This app lets you keep shooting so you do not have to stop and process the combined exposure shot.  It then saves the two images to the camera roll for future processing. Combining the images can be done later. The beauty of this process is you can continue to move from section to section capturing images to blend for the final image you want. So the 64 shots represented 32 sections of this building. In AutoStitch I selected all 64 shots and the app blended them not only for the pano but also for the exposure. (I learned that from an iPhone buddy.) How cool is that! The shape of the above image is what happens when you stitch them together and is how AutoStitch renders the files before cropping down. I did not crop this one as I liked the funky shape. I did go on to process the image with some of my favorite apps for an artistic rendering using; DynamicLight:ArtistaSketch:Iris for layering and blending, PerfectPhoto for sharpening and Crop'n'Frame for the frame and mat.

I shared this image with some iPhone friends and I received some feedback on the opening image from an iPhone buddy who thought the smokey area above the chimney was a bit distracting, and I thought the branch on the right was also distracting so I went into TouchRetouch App and used the clone tool to spot them out and cropped the image in Iris. There is truly an app for everything you could do in Photoshop with a large DSLR file. Oh and I added a ray of light above the chimney.

Then I used the VintageScene app to further enhance my vision of the image here.

And I also made a close up stitch using 14 images of one of the exterior windows I found so beautiful in the design and age with peeling paint around the frame.

A few new Apps in Town: Rays and Dynamic Light

ArtistaSketch layered with original HDR image captured with BracketMode, processed in TrueHDR, and PhotoForge for effects.

These two apps are fabulous for certain effects. Rays, drops "Rays" into your image and you have the ability to move them where you want, adjust the opacity, lengthen or shorten and choose a color. Pretty cool stuff, the app even puts shadows in where they would actually fall, if in fact the "Rays" really existed. Notice the light falling on the steps above and the shadows from the column...they were as a result of "Rays" app. These are just a few images I have made since I downloaded the Rays app.

Zoom effect applied to image before adding in Rays.

The image above also has Dynamic light applied to it to generate an image with the "Orton" effect.
There are other settings in Dynamic light which "pop" your images.  Give em a try for only .99 cents they are a deal!

The Magic Bus......Hipstamatic: Tejas Lens: Dream Canvas Film: PicGrunger

Hipstamatic Tejas and Dream Canvas

Today I introduced myself as an "iPhone Photographer" to a shop owner....now that's a thought...but I didn't know how else to say it....I have been meeting a student every Tuesday for some private tutoring in Severna Park, MD.  Because of this I have traveled over the Key Bridge a few times in the last few weeks through the industrial side of town. The scenes intrigue me with venting pipe stacks and abandoned industry buildings, shipyards, gas tanks and railroads. So last week I got off the highway to explore before crossing over the bridge on the way back home. While driving around last week, I saw this little auto repair shop with some old VW's in front of it, but was heading home and did not stop. Today, I stopped and asked George if it was OK to make some images. He was most obliging. The Old Red VW bus caught my eye! In the 70's I had a friend with a VW bus and well they were the vehicle of choice for the "Hippie" generation, this one still bore an aging Love~Peace bumper sticker. It wasn't going anywhere, all the tires were flat and it appeared to be just sitting in the lot. Maybe it was junked there because it was too expensive to fix, like my Jetta. Now VW has a new prototype in the works to bring back the "Bus." Check it out here The New BUS.

BracketMode App  used here.

BracketMode app used here

Hipstamatic: Tejas Lens Dream Canvas Film: PicGrunger Processing effect.

And I had to shoot the bug too!

Hipsta Chuncky Lens and The Cars

I chose to shoot some images with the Hipstamatic App with the Chunky Lens and Kodot XGrizzled film for the "look" it would add to the images of the rusting cars.
I also maintained a consistent processing here with the PicGrunger app.

 

 

 

This image was made with the John S Lens and Inas 1969 Film in the Hipstamatic App

The next two shots were made with the Tejas Lens and Pistal Film choices in the Hipstamatic app.

 

 It was a fun day looking at the old cars and shooting these images.

Hipstamatic: Salvadore 84 Lens, Dream Canvas Film at the Car Farm

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of visiting the "Car Farm" with Don Rosenberger and Bob Lott. It was a beautifully sunny and warm 65 degree day. I have seen images from this location for the past couple years from other photographers and was very happy when Don invited me to shoot there. It's not open to anyone so special arrangements have to be made. Don lives in Virginia and visits often, so he has a special contact with the owners.
I took a break from working with the "Big" camera and tripod and walked around looking at the rusting cars...and made some images as I walked with the iPhone. For the images here I was shooting with the Hipstamatic and the Salvadore Lens, a crazy lens selection that creates interesting images. I thought it would be fun to see what it would do with the details I was shooting on the old cars. Now I have to get to work on the "Big" Camera images.

TiltShiftGen: MonoPhix

Went to Longwood yesterday and in the afternoon, after lunch, I went back to the conservatory to make some iPhone images with the idea of processing them with TiltShiftGen~ the selective focus app. Actually I felt better about the  images I made with the iPhone than I did with the "big" camera.

When I returned home I worked on a couple images and applied the selective focus areas. Then I got caught up watching the amazing images from Japan: an unimaginable disaster and tragedy...So I did not finish them off. Today was a terrific day, I spent the day attending the John Barclay~Tony Sweet seminar, at Goucher College, sponsored by the Baltimore Camera Club.
When I got home tonight I finished these off in Crop'n'Frame for the borders and signature. The opening image was made using the app Diptic, to arrange the images.