The subtitle of this post is “Because it’s my blog and I like it”. Sometimes a girl just wants to get down and get abstract. I took some picture of a rusty nuts and bolts holding a fence together. I superimposed the same image three times, make each one a little more transparent and at a different offset.
Then, used Iris to apply Classic Grunge. The border is from Jazz, as well as a slight vignetting.
– the Daily Grunge
Found this mushroom in wet grass on my early morning walk. Interesting spirals around the head of the mushroom, and the texture is diviiiiiiiine.
Enhancements: Photo Jazz, for grunge, cropping, border, and color enhancement. PaintFX HDPro to bring out the fuzzy texture of the mushroom.
– the Daily Grunge
Thrift store window. A fabulous display of old and strange-looking guitars and LP album covers. And a copper-plated flute, which I have never even HEARD of before. The Gene Autrey-style guitar at the top is in a weird circle thing, I have no idea what it is but who cares, it nicely frames the painted front.
I LOVE junk shops, thrift stores, consignment shops. But, I almost never go inside. They always have the best stuff in the window, invariably. It is sheerest disappointment to enter one of these establishments, what is camp and interesting from the outside becomes a depressing torture up close.
Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but fingerprints. Or something like that.
– the Daily Grunge
Decim8 is not only an interesting photo app, it’s a great time-waster. Take any snapshot, anything at all, and start applying one or multiple of the many effects Decim8 offers. It will totally – um, how to say this – reorganize the pixels of your original image. You have no control. In fact, if you choose an effect, and retry it over and over, each one will be different and unique.
Sometimes the results are strange, sometimes fascinating, sometimes irritating, but occasionally you’ll get something you love and want to use as-is. Far more often, I use it to grunge up a a heavily layered image, to lose some of the realism. The pic above is a Steve Cote sculpture I’ve featured before; his work captures light in a wonderful way.
Here are some more Decim8tions to give you a flavor of what is possible with this app.
– the Daily Grunge
Weather, what we mean by that term in NC. There is no such thing as a gentle rain, sprinking, or an all-day rain. There is SUN, or CLOUDBURST, nothing in between.
I captured an impending storm from my front porch while enjoying an early-morning cup of coffee (by early morning, I mean 10:30). Played up the clouds with PaintFX’s Green Glow effect.
True to form, it rained really hard for about 20 minutes, but before I could cancel my pool outing, the sun was out and everything was dry again.
– the Daily Grunge
More practice with water pictures. This was taken looking down into a fountain, then enhanced with PaintFX HD, and contrast. It brought out the reflected colors of the surrounding trees and shrubs.
I have to say, since it’s my blog and I can rant, I tried working with this image in PhotoFX, as opposed to PaintFX, and although the app has some very nice features, it is just too buggy to use. After working on the image for 10 minutes, I tapped “save”, and the phone just … turned off. Needless to say, the picture wasn’t saved either. I tried again many times, same thing when adding a layer, and sometimes the effects wouldn’t get rendered either. So PhotoFX is a #FAIL for this iphoneographer.
I finally found Haiku, an app I heard about from a fellow iPhoneographer months ago, but was given the wrong name for. So I found it and had to give it a try. Skeptical at first, I nevertheless find some value (and fun) in using it.
The premise of what it does is simple: take a photo, create an ink-outline and watercolor print, which can be endlessly adjusted, tweaked, and generally messed around with. Warning: this takes practice. The number of adjustments is overwhelming, and they are not always well-named or easy to grasp (ink outline vs. ink outline detail, for instance). You can choose “stylized watercolor” vs. “abstract watercolor”, paint variety, wet edges, borders, many more.
My chief complaint is that it is difficult to not have the paint effect be blotchy, and it is not easy to control the amount of paint. This is where the practice comes in! However, in the upper right, there is a dice icon which does what you might think: a randomization of effects, which is a good place to start when working with Haiku.
The pic above is a Steve Cote sculpture from City Tap Bar and Grill, whose work I have highlighted before on this blog.
– the Daily Grunge
A good night for photography at the Roost. In addition to all the pictures of Justin, published here previously, at a lull in the tableside conversation I turned the iPhone up to the underside of the umbrella over my table.
Enhanced with PaintFX ProHD, nothing else. One of my go-to filters for making a picture out of a snapshot. It is a little tricky to use, you must set radius, tone, and details. The balance between these 3 settings will give you an enormous range of effects ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, but no matter what, you will find pixels in your image that you did not know were there.
– the Daily Grunge
