Long Shadows

From a winter afternoon stroll at the farm.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

A few vignettes from a stroll at UGA

“Vignette” has the meaning of a small image that provides an impressionistic glimpse of a scene or subject. Nowadays we use the term to mean a fade to dark border on a picture. Here I use both meanings quite literally. Enjoy some glimpses of the University of Georgia campus from an afternoon stroll. We set out to go to lunch, I snapped a few photos along the way. This was not a photo walk, I just used my smartphone. The photos were post-processed in Photo Gallery, PaintShop Pro and Picasa. Picasa supplied all the vignetting.

Picasa reconstructs the walk and the photo stops, and yes, you can tell where we took our meal – always a good place to eat.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Geese in the Kitchen

On cold, rainy days taking pictures can be outright unpleasant. That does not mean that you can’t have fun with photography. I recently joined a Google+ community that is “dedicated to learning the art of Black and White photography through weekly assignments, discussion, and critique”. It has been enjoyable and sometimes challenging.

A recent assignment was to shoot some photos of textures and patterns, followed with the task of combining a texture with a photo. I looked a my texture collection and then some recent photos of Canada geese came to mind. The weather was miserable when I set out to photograph the geese. It had rained, the water of the pond was murkier than usual. Then it started to rain again. I kept shooting until my camera was so wet I started to worry. The photos were no masterpieces. A little prank came to mind.

One of my texture pictures was of a restaurant floor. I tiled about eight images of this together into a large one. In PaintShop Pro I manipulated the image so the tiles would appear to be seen from an angle. One of the geese photos was superposed in a layer. I duplicated this layer and selected the geese, making the rest of the image transparent. Then I adjusted the transparency of the middle layer.

Of course it was not quite this simple as I did not get the tiles image right the first few times.

I had to include more tiles and make the edges match, then “tilt” the image so it would be similar as the plane of the pond water. It took me a lot longer than it would an expert, but I am sure that I had more fun.

Once the stack of images looked right I collapsed it into a single image, made the final corrections and added my signature. Now here is my masterpiece:

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Color is where you find it

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