Seattle has had unseasonably warm weather. In fact, after breaking cold records, we now are breaking warm records. Climate change? I don’t know. There is still a tiny bit of snow on the ground on our street.
This plant I believe, is called a Spurge. It’s hard to tell because there are so many and they all look different. Believe it or not, this is not its flower. It has so many incarnations and each one is incredibly beautiful.
Enjoy your day.
This last week a new app was released for iPhone and iPad. It’s called Kino Glitch. $1.99 at the App Store.
For those of you unfamiliar with Glitch apps, they’re meant to pretty much destroy your photo or drawing.
But this app is different. You have quite a bit of control over it. It’s different from any Glitch app I’ve ever used.
You choose the type of grid you want. Then you can adjust the size of the grid and how much Glitch effect comes through the grid. I chose none for this.
Then you can add a background and overlay.
You can also take your fingers and start moving the piece around. This is proving to be great fun.
The developer seems responsive to problems.
For anyone interested, I own a page on Instagram that features all kinds of photography, edits and art. If you would like to be featured, just tag to #BPA_Arts.
Enjoy your day!
No, I didn’t just swear at you. That is what this plant is called. I’m guessing it’s a succulent. But it may be a relative to the artichoke. None of my followers on Instagram seem to know and I’m too lazy to look on the Internet.
I believe in always sharing how I process my photos. I a, no great post processor, but I find it extremely helpful when people share how they get to the end of a journey.
I believe that the more I share, the more I will get back. Like, what goes around, comes around. I have found that saying to be more than true in my time here on earth.
I also particularly love the phrase “give the person enough rope to hang themselves.” That’s another one that I have always seen come true. It takes awhile, but it happens. Usually, they don’t need all that much rope. What I have also observed, is that we don’t realize what’s going on inside that person that is making others so miserable. I have learned they are miserable inside. Like I don’t need to bother with revenge or getting back at them. I could never think up a punishment worse than what they do to themselves. Plus, if I were to bother with revenge, it would harm me. It would take me into being negative. It would poison me. Why go there? It’s not worth it. It really isn’t. It may seem so at the time. You can almost taste it. But I know now, it’s simply not. But learn for yourself. Waste your time if you want. Most people have to learn the hard way. I don’t know why that is, but they do. I did. I wish I had taken more advice. I wish I had listened a bit more to my Dad.
Ok. Back to sharing the post processing of the photo. I can’t. I found this inside Snapseed. I hadn’t saved it! I don’t have a clue what I did to it. Other than to say it was in Snapseed. I don’t use Snapseed that much for post processing anymore, so I think it was in there to crop it for Instagram. But then why wasn’t it saved? I don’t know! But I love this. It’s not straight from the camera either.
I’m grateful I found it. I think it’s one of my better photos. I’ve been trying very hard to get this effect. Very light lights and dark darks. I know people are using Stackables for this. While this is close to what I’ve been trying to get, it’s not there yet.
So, I’m going to keep trying.
Sunflower
This is a sunflower photograph I took recently. Warren and I were on a drive heading east in Washington state. We stopped in at Index which is a very picturesque little village nestled among the cascades and sits below Mt. Index.
On the way home, we stopped in Gold Bar for lunch. I had the absolute worst meal of grease ever. I will spare you the details. I’ll just say that when traveling in small towns, Mexican is your best bet. While it may not be the best, it is hard to ruin a taco. One has to work incredibly hard to ruin rice, beans and a taco.
After lunch, we came upon a poor little bedraggled sunflower plant in someone’s front yard. I have been seeing glorious fields of sunflowers lately. I was extremely disappointed. But I figured, what the heck. You never know. Well, I ended up with this beautiful photo.
So, you never know when that one special photo will show up in your camera.
This was taken with my iPhone 6 Plus camera on auto, using Camera+. I may have used macro mode, I forget.
For post processing, I started in Enlight. That is my new go-to app. I have been a real fan of Snapseed and still use it. But I find that I can make some more subtle changes in Enlight. I especially like the Clarify settings under image. Those settings there seem to offer a bit different set of adjustments for sharp, saturation and black.
Then I took this into iColorama in the style settings.
Finally, I took it into Tangled Fx and used one of my custom settings. I love Tangled Fx. I like to make my own adjustments to their settings. I have about 15 special settings.
Enjoy!
Maui Fern
This is a photo I took with Camera+. There is a big difference between Camera Plus and Camera+, so don’t get confused. Camera+ is an awesome app for your iPhone. However, don’t buy it for the iPad. It’s a total ripoff. It has none of the features it does on the iPhone.
I used their macro setting which is not a real macro setting, but definitely brings you in closer on your subject. Camera+ will let you set exposure, focus, white balance and other settings if you want. They give you more than one way to do this. I like to just tap both fingers on the phone screen and then tap in the exposure circle or the focus square to get what I want when I shoot. Also their auto focus works great.
I shot this last year in Maui, although it could have been shot here in Seattle. But, this is a Maui fern. It is in a favorite place of mine, Kula Lodge in Maui, up in the mountain, as you go towards Haleakala, the volcano on Maui.
This was overexposed and posed some other problems. I was going to toss it, but found that hard to do. I had recently watched a Mike Moats video. If you don’t know who he is, rush, I mean, rush over here. Mike is a totally awesome macro photographer.
Anyway, I was watching one of his videos where he used Nik Software’s Viveza2 to work on a photo that had some problems. Nik Software is made by Google. It used to cost a lot of money. But now, for some odd reason they give it away free. There are also free videos on how to use it up at You Tube.
Anyway, in Viveze2 there are these little dots that you put on your photo, They expand into a circle that you can then add contrast, saturation and other elements to in your photo. So I worked on the overexposed areas in the photo and Viveza2 did it’s magic and my photo was no longer overexposed.
I hope you enjoy this image. I had fun taking it and enhancing it.
Kerry C. Mitchell's Adventures 