Whenever I go to my favorite local brewhouse for brunch, and eat on the patio, the only thing to take a picture of is the umbrella overhead, and I’m sick of that, so this time I did a shot of the umbrella reflected in my coffee spoon. Add a couple of sweating glasses of sparkling water (I’m a teetotaler) and brighten it up a bit with Photo Toaster, and done.

Two more treatments of yesterday’s chicken (rooster?) sculpture. There was a man’s face interestingly framed by the chicken’s back and wings. Also another edit to boost up the colors. The cropped version was with PhotoToaster, and the other was with Jazz. When I use Jazz, it can be fun to take one the random “improv” treatments it does of a photo, and sometimes I use its full set of features to create my own effects.

  
Another of those crude but effective folk art sculptures made out of random pieces of metal welded together and left out in the elements to weather. I love the acquired texture these sculptures take on, vastly preferring it to smooth, slick pieces. This piece is what I guess you’d call “whimsical”, a chicken wearing a pince-nez, but what the heck. In a constant search for photographic subjects, sometimes we shouldn’t be too choosy. I used it as an opportunity to practice drawing out a picture where there really wasn’t anything too interesting. It might still not be interesting. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. I keep trying and pushing through.

  
A fish swimming in a sea of umbrellas. That’s how my metal fish looked as I was leaving the Gugelhopf. I had already taken my picture of it, but it screamed to be shown in its natural habitat. See last Friday’s pic for a detail of this fun sculpture.

  
So I was at the Gugelhopf coffee house in Durham. They have very good coffee and food, with a big terrace where you can sit outside for hours. I don’t know what it is about this place, but they’ve just created a fantastic atmosphere that is relaxed and fun and oddly creative. For me, anyway. I open my laptop and write, or talk through ideas, and today I took some pictures of the antique metal sculptures. Some are quite clever, with their weathered look, and this fish is oddly realistic for a piece of folk art. #JustForFun

  
This the same “pair of pears” I posted the other day, this time with a Glaze edit to add this textured overlay. Fruit is great for still life work, should you be so inclined. I like to just FIND still lifes, not create them. I had put the pears on the window sill to soften up a little, without realizing it was a photo op. Really, you’d think I’d know by now, everything is a photo op. Literally. You can take a picture anywhere, of anything. If it’s boring, maybe you’re not trying. Of course, not every picture is going to evoke greatness, but that is really, truly no excuse for not working on editing. Because sometimes a simple crop is enough to turn a bad snapshot into a composition. Maybe not a masterpiece. But if you practice in this way, when you do get that money shot, you will have the editing skills and a developed eye.

  
Not really. The “busy afternoon”. It was one of those days I would have paid someone $1000 to run through the room with a machete, just to snap me out of intense boredom. Sometimes I fall into a stupor, and I realize that boredom is one of the most insidious traps you can fall into. It is important to snap out of it, or pull yourself out of it bodily, which is how it feels to me, as though I have been epoxied to my chair, to my thoughts, to my ennui. I have enough self-awareness to know that when I get like this, it is most important not to play mind-deadening games on my phone, it’s one of the worst possible “cures” for boredom since it seals the top over my mental rut. So even as I picked up the phone (Danger! Danger!) I tapped on the camera and decided to try using “Glaze”, just because i hadn’t edited with that app for a while. About 45 minutes later, I realized that I was fully engaged with my editing, with working up other photos in my library, and definitely not bored. Problem solved.

  
I freakin’ love this picture. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, which was to take a face and make it fade until all you could really make out is the fact of the features. I’ve done this before, as fans of my work will remember. This time I found a new way to do it, with this transparent wash and a little crackle texture. Usually, I go with high contrast and blurring, and I still like that, but we must evolve. Nobody wants to see the same picture over and over again, for years. We all know artists (and writers), some of them very successful, who seem to just create the same work again. And again. Some of them make a lot of money with winning formulas, too. I don’t make very much money with my photography, whether the formula works or not, but I’m in it for the creative capital and how it makes me feel. That’s my motivation for wanting to keep the shark moving forward, lest it die and rot.

  
Yes, it might be weird, disturbing even, but I can’t stop looking at it. Just can’t stop staring at it. I would not frame this and put it on my wall, but it is so amazing in terms of texture and graphic impact.

You might recognize the image from some of the “fashion shoot” images posted earlier. I took the straight off-the-camera image and applied one of the “abstract” filters in an app called “Glaze”. I had never found a use for this line-drawing filters before, because they’re so strange, but if you’re TRYING to get a different look, this definitely is it. It has a carved look, or almost like extruded plastic.

  The picture, obviously, is of a Shuffle, with powerBeats. Not so obvious is the filter: edited in LoMob, with the 1980s filter.

So I picked up a friend of mine — sort of a casual acquaintance actually — in my car and took a moment to plug in my iPod to charge. “Oooooohh, you just have to have your TOYS, don’t you”, she said, voice dripping with disdain and sarcasm, as though an iPod is a silly bit of frippery. I let it go. I could have told her that in 1980, I had at least 800 record albums, and my stereo took up a whole shelf, as well as two corners of the room for the speakers. Aside from sheer bulk, the problems with that setup are numerous: your vinyl records wore down and got scratched every time you played them; you had to put them away in their sleeves; you had to get up and lift the needle to skip a song, and maybe make another scratch; those huge speakers were so powerful you would get evicted if you ever dared to crank up the volume, so always heard a small range of the actual music. Putting on headphones was a slight improvement for fidelity, but then you were tethered to the stereo, perhaps lying on the floor. Now, you can fit the entire kit and caboodle in your pocket. When I go out for a walk, I have not only my stereo system, but my entire music collection. And the sound is AWESOME. And the albums never wear out, no matter how many times I play them.

Is a stereo a toy? Is a record collection a toy? Is it perhaps virtuous to have the whole thing take up an entire room, and thus rarely listened to? Or is the player-and-earbuds equipage so completely normal that the old-fashioned vinyl-and-speakers thing is the toy?