What a day.  It’s Monday, so of course my brain feels like a plate of Welsh rarebit.  And I’m not even Welsh.  Anyway, I was staying up late at night, running some really boring performance tests and decided to do that exercise I do to stimulate my creativity:  for the next 10 minutes, work on an image, and at the end of 10 minutes, whatever it looks like is the pic of the day.

So it’s an hour later.  I did a box of eggs that looked like a mountain range, some Decim8tions, and a bunch of other stuff that even I couldn’t stand to look at.  So finally just took an image of, I think, Pixie Geldoff, by snapping a pic in Vogue, and then decimating it.  Since she’s wearing an Andy Warhol t-shirt, I thought this was appropriate.  The six frames should be different colors, but 10 minutes have been over for a looooooong time, so this is today’s offering.

Astonishing but true — I went to a North Carolina barn dance, in a real working cattle barn.  Four generations of the Terry clan have an annual barn dance which is packed to the rafters.  I have never had an experience like it and will remember it forever.  So many people having so much fun — laughing and stomping and spinning and hooting and hollering and raising the roof.

This gentleman is Randy, the patriarch, who not only runs the farm, he calls the square dances. He is a true original — craggy and crusty but warm, strong and fun-loving too.  The good will in that barn was palpable; everyone was truly thrilled to be there enjoying the music, the dancing, each other’s company, and a little moonshine from a truck in the parking lot by the cow pasture.

Incidentally, there was almost no light in the barn, so taking pictures was a real challenge.  Since there are shadows on the floor in this shot, you can tell I wasn’t using a flash.

Again, this is iPhoneography folks.  Just me and my iPhone, no big DSLR here.  As Chase Jarvis says, the best camera is the one you have with you.

When you live with someone as sharp-eyed as my husband, you end up with objects like these around your house.  (Along with an enormous number of 4-leafed clovers.).  On a bike ride through the woods, he spotted a deer antler off under a tree.  Last summer, we were wading through a swamp and he found this turtle shell.  I don’t have much use for knick-knacks, but these suit me just fine.

I placed the objects on a white bookshelf, and love the white-on-white look, but it was hard to get the exposure the way I wanted it.  After a lot of careful tweaking of contrast, brightness and saturation, I applied a parchment effect that made it come together.

I LOVED working on this image.  I have an old hand-carved wooden buddha head that I got from a small shop in Rockport, Massachusetts.  It has a very strong grain which greatly enhances the beauty of the piece.

I took a picture of it, cropped it, and superimposed a picture I had on my phone of a blossom from a tulip tree; the ground was littered with them this spring.  Using Superimpose, I used a tonal feather-mask to gradually make the flower more and more transparent.  Working very carefully, it took hundreds of taps with the mask tool to get this effect that lets the buddha show through the flower petals.

I admit freely that this is not a very original image 🙂  But it is peaceful and serene, and was very fun to create.

Swiss chard.

While making dinner the other night, I cut the end off a big bunch of chard and was immediately reminded of those fabulous Edward Weston pictures of cabbage.  The true artistry of those, of course, was that nobody had done art prints of vegetables in that style before, the silver gelatin prints that were so smooth and luminous.

Of course, it was the subject matter only that made me think of Weston, this pic is very textural, but now that I’m thinking of him, everything seems like a candidate for Westonesque presentation.  I saw a squished spider on pavement that reminded me of those tar stains on beach rocks that he did; sand ripples; once you start looking you see Weston everywhere.  But I still don’t know how he did it: taking these minute views of pedestrian subjects, and making them into masterpieces.  It will take a little more study and thought.

Image was taken with iPhone, Iris Photosuite to render it B&W, boosted the contrast.