Week 27: Photo manipulation

When I started this blog, the intention was to only post photos, but as I have been learning and growing I found myself more interested in what is called photo manipulation. That is not to say that I won't be taking photos and enjoying them just for themselves any more, just that my horizon's have broadened and when I feel the desire to create an image that I cannot setup in the real world for whatever reason I now have other options.

This one has a bit of history behind it. I've been doing a couple of photo manipulation tutorials. One of them had you create a beautiful background with arches through which you could see storm clouds and then in the foreground was a woman with her hands raised to the sky. Now I like the background, but the woman did very little for me so I decided to find a substitute. The same tutorial alter on had a small urn with water flowing out of it, which inspired me to play with filling the floor level with water just to see, but then that triggered the question, why would the building be filled with water? And the answer is off course the broom with its bucket. 

For those of you who don't understand this at all, have a look at Disney's 'The Magician's Apprentice'. Its a lovely little story about an apprentice who had to do all the chores, including carrying buckets of water to fill up a tub. The magician was not around and the apprentice thought it was unfair that he had to do this if they could just use magic, so he took the magician's hat and want and magicked a broom to carry the buckets. Unfortunately once the broom started, the apprentice could not make it stop and it kept carrying buckets of water and pouring them out into the tub. The tub could off course only take so much and eventually the whole building was flooded. Various things happened, but in the end the magician came back and fixed it all and the apprentice was back to carrying buckets of water himself. Very cute and worth watching!

Back to my photo, I created this broom with its bucket, but I just could not make it work with the arched background of my tutorial. But it was too much fun to just relegate to a corner of my hard drive, and so I went out looking for a background to suit it.

I mostly used photos by other people who have provided those images as free to use stock photos or under the Creative Commons licence and so everything you here has been derived from the photo's (and links) below.

* Broom by 1024greenstreet

* Bucket by Katie Cordrey

* Stairs - PirateLotus-Stock (on deviant art) <a href="http://piratelotus-stock.deviantart.com/art/Stairs-stock-139642387" rel="nofollow">piratelotus-stock.deviantart.com/art/Stairs-stock-139642387</a>

* Texture for red carpet by tassie.sim

* Winged Lion - my own photo
* Wood grain texture - my own photo

* Fire and water brushes - Obsidian Dawn (on deviant art)  <a href="http://redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Flames-Fire-Photoshop-Brushes-17721488?q=boost:popular+fire+brushes&qo=0" rel="nofollow">redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Flames-Fire-Photoshop-Bru...</a> and <a href="http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&global=1&q=water+brushes#/dm8agx" rel="nofollow">browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&global=1&...</a>

I hope this has made at least one person smile.

week 26: Abstract building reflections

Week 26 - half way there, but this week I'm cheating (oh and yes I'm a bit late too). I have taken photos, just not many and none that I'm ready to display yet. But I am finding myself drawn to photo manipulation, so this week I did several tutorials. I ended up with a few half-finished pieces, but all of them are missing something. Some of them will require me to go out and shoot what I'm missing others may just require more thought first. And I will hopefully be able to put one of them on here. Anyway to get back to this week's photo and why its cheating; its old, in fact a whole year old, but I'm going through all my old photos.

Nothing much technically about the photo - it was still captured with my Panasonic Lumix (like the first 3.5 months of this blog was) and I didn't need to do much in pp except lighten the shadows a bit.

Oh and I have a new photographic hero - Jean-Francois Rauzier. If you've got a couple of minutes looking and playing with his hyper-photos is absolutely amazing.

week 25: Warwick castle

After 6.5 years in the country I have finally managed to get myself to Warwick castle. Initially I booked tickets for last winter to go with my sister - they have some fun tours and stuff. But our winter visit got completely snowed out. We spent 7 hours stuck on a highway in the snow 3 days earlier and wasn't willing to try that again - if only I knew  back then it was so close to the rail station, but then again with trains in this country and snow... hmm probably better we didn't go back then. Anyway, back to last weekend's visit. It was lovely day, if a little hot. My Mom in law went with me and we  made the mistake of going up to the battlements. Ok, so they warn you its one-way and that it can be tiring. What they don't say is that the bloody stairwells are twisty and barely big enough to walk in - quite problematic for claustrophobic people, but we survived with nothing worse than severely tight muscles from clinging to every hand hold. We enjoyed the audio tours quite a lot and seen several other bits and pieces, including birds of prey of which despite me setting my camera to continuous shooting I got no decent photos of.

This photo was one of the earlier ones I took and the only one with reflections of the actual castle on the river Avon. Towards the back of the river you can see the old mill house. The castle fell into serious disrepair before being refurnished and turned into a tourist attraction, but most of the repairs are almost invisible and this is well worth a visit if you come to England and have a day or so to spare.

week 24: London at dusk

Hmm, I missed another one last week. To be honest I was (and still am) working on another photography project to tell a simple story using only images, but I've only done photos 2 and 3 and I really would like to do number 1 before I start posting them here, maybe next week if I've managed to do some more by then. Or maybe I'll do them all at once. Meanwhile I suspect this will become a project of taking and posting 52 pictures in about 13 or 14 months at the rate I'm going at the moment, but never mind.

This photo was taken on the way to the Docklands and Greenwich Festival where my Mom-in-law and I went to see Les Girafes, which was very cute. We had to changeover from one DLR line to another and fortunately had to cross the bridge over the tracks, otherwise I never would have seen this one. The windows are a touch dirty, but I still like the imagery and the colours. And then I discovered it would also fit in nicely in the DPS assignment for the week (vertical lines)