iPhoneography

Melancholy and iPhone Fun

Since I’ve been back, I’ve been catching up on life, and my photography work has consisted of culling and editing photos from Yellowstone and getting images edited and printed for my photography groups. I was also 2 or 3 weeks behind in Start to Finish and Be Still 52 (Kim Klassen’s classes), but knew I would have time to catch up soon.

A couple days ago I started going through the lessons I hadn’t done and found myself feeling inspired again to create a still life. One of the more recent lessons included a preset called melancholy– and a suggestion to revisit the whole wabi-sabi idea, which I loved. I enjoyed creating this image, which is very different from my usual shooting and processing style.

And now for a couple random iPhone photos. I didn’t take many photos this week, but did enjoy processing them.

This is the bridge (over a dry wash) that we cross when we walk the trail at Willow Lake. If you look closely, you can see the white southwestern prickly poppies that are in bloom along the trail. The basic edit was in Snapseed- and then I used one of the filters in Glaze (an app that I really don’t understand) and added some textures in Mextures, which also gave it a vignette.

The photo below was taken in our front yard and is a closeup of the flowers (and fruit?) of a spiky foundation planting in our flower bed. Now that it’s blooming, I notice this plant everywhere we go in Arizona. Last fall I cut off many of the dried stalks and put them in my old milk can on the front porch. You can see what they look like dried here. I edited the photo in Photo Wizard, which is a great app for basic editing (it even has a curves adjustment!), as well as having a zillion special filters and effects, from textures and vignettes to motion blur and a bathroom glass filter. I have yet to explore it fully- guess I need to go on another road trip!

I’m linking up with App-happy Wednesday again!

June 11, 2014June 11, 2014

Melinda6 Comments

App Happy and Catching Up

It’s App Happy Wednesday over at Keeping With the Times, so I’m posting a couple road trip/through the window shots today. I’m also catching up with my Start to Finish 2 Lessons, so my still life images are on here today as well.

First the iPhone photos! After a day and a half of driving (actually riding, as my husband- who has been suffering from allergies and asthma- was doing ALL the driving. . .), I was happy to see red rock as we got to southern Utah, a sign that we were close to Arizona. I think the first shot was edited in Snapseed, and then I added the text/graphic with Rhonna. The second photo was edited in PS Touch, because I needed to do some cloning- and then I added texture with Photo Wizard.

Now for the Start to Finish lesson! The assignment was to create a still life that included eggs. Hurray- something I actually have! No browsing in antique stores for me today! I realized straightaway that still life photography is still challenging for me. I feel confident in the photography and the processing- but not with the styling. I am so in awe of my classmates and their styling ability! I found that what works for me is keeping it simple; when I add too many elements, it all falls apart.

This above image was one of my last shots. Filling the frame and using a shallow depth of field- definitely my comfort zone!

The above macro shot may not technically be a still life- you barely notice the other eggs!

And here is a from above shot, which I do love doing.

I found myself opting for a darker, more matte processing style today. The blue and brown tones seemed washed out with my usual editing, and I found reducing exposure and using a matte curve gave me the look I was going for. In Photoshop I added Kim Klassen’s simple texture- and called it done!

I also played catch up with some Flickr challenges- and discovered that one of them, fast food, worked with my egg theme!

No special processing here- just a quick Lightroom edit. This might be my favorite of the day!

June 4, 2014June 3, 2014

Melinda8 Comments

iPhoneography On The Road

Our road trip to Yellowstone gave me plenty of opportunity to practice my iPhoneography skills. The road was long, but scenic, and I had fun editing shots as my husband did the driving. Of course my Nikon was my main camera, but nothing beats a cameraphone for instant results- photos edited with iPhone apps, uploaded to Dropbox during the drive and immediately available on my laptop to post to my blog.

We stopped at Hoover Dam on the way to Yellowstone- first visit for both my husband and myself. Both these photos were edited in Snapseed using the HDR filter. I also warmed them up and added a bit of sharpening and “structure.”

We spent the night in Idaho Falls, a familiar stop for us. After dinner we drove over to the falls, where I snapped this photo. I used Snapseed again for a simple edit (contrast and sharpening) and also used the selective adjust feature to add a bit of a vignette (lightening the middle and darkening the edges). On my wishlist for Snapseed is a vignette filter! I do love the selective adjust feature however; it is similar to the control points used in Nik software.

As you can see from this photo (edited with Waterlogue, we arrived at Yellowstone!

I’m linking up today with Barb’s “app” happy Wednesday. I learn so much from reading her posts and the others who link to her.

May 21, 2014May 20, 2014

Melinda8 Comments

Roses- and Moonlit Wind Turbines

My Mother’s Day flowers came just in time- I was running out of things to photograph for a still life! This is my favorite shot so far of the beautiful roses given to me by my husband.

Since this is App-Happy Wednesday over at Keeping with the Times, I’m also including an iPhone photo.

This week, I got a fun new (to me) app called Distressed FX; I tend to pick new apps when I see others using them on Instagram. I confess I fell in love with the app when I saw you could add flocks of birds to your photos. Two things about this photo: 1) the subject is wind turbines in the moonlight (I’m kind of obsessed with photographing wind turbines on road trips) and 2) I wanted to fade the texture, but couldn’t find my original to blend with it (and besides, the birds would have faded too). I know I could have done something with Adobe Photoshop Touch, but didn’t take the time to figure it out. I have a lot to learn!

May 14, 2014May 13, 2014

Melinda12 Comments

Happy With Apps

I’ve become a mad collector of photo apps for my iPhone- it’s amazing how many there are! I think I need to stop until I fully understand the ones I have.

I took a shot of this starfish on my bathroom counter. In Snapseed (my go-to app that I mostly DO understand), I cropped it to a square, sharpened it a bit, converted it to black and white and added a vintage filter, which added some warm tones. I then added a texture in Mextures and the text in Phonto. Pretty simple!

I’m linking up with Barb’s App- Happy Wednesday!

May 7, 2014May 7, 2014

Melinda10 Comments

Road Trip

On road trips my husband does all the driving- and I read, play Words with Friends, and take photos out the window with my phone. Now that I have more apps than ever before, I have a lot of fun editing the photos. The last two were taken through the car window at 60+ miles per hour; I found that adding textures (in Snapseed or Mextures) helped disguise any reflections in the glass.

I’m linking up today with “app happy” Wednesday on Barb’s Keeping with the Times.

Photo 1: The Starbucks we finally found after searching for 45 minutes (painted in Waterlogue)

Photo 2: Power Lines in the Sun (edited in Mextures and blended back with the original in Image Blender)

Photo 3: The Road Ahead (textured – can’t remember which app- sorry- then painted in Waterlogue and blended with original)

April 30, 2014May 2, 2014

Melinda4 Comments

App Happy!

I took this shot with my iPhone of one of the birdhouses in our backyard (left by the previous owner). It is perched on a piece of driftwood, and is very low to the ground. I haven’t seen any birds going in it, but I might be missing something. Do the quail or roadrunners fly up into it??? Seems like the opening is too small. My bird-knowledgeable friends need to help me out here.

Several apps were used as part of my process for this image. I forgot that I could take the shot in square mode, thus eliminating cropping it to a square afterward- so I needed to crop it in one of the apps. I used PicTapGo for this and also added a bit of warmth. I found myself really disliking the right side of the photo (rocks and an out-of-focus branch), so I then opened the photo in Snapseed and used the Tilt-Shift effect to blur out the unwanted parts of the image. Next, I added a texture in Mextures and a watercolor filter in Waterlogue. I finished it off by adding the word, Home, in Phonto. Five apps for one photo? Seems a bit extreme, but it worked for me this time.

As part of my quest to learn more about iPhoneography, I am linking up today with Barb’s new App-Happy Wednesday on Keeping With the Times. I’m eager to see what the other iPhoneographers have done- I’m such a newbie at all of this!

Note to my friends who take photos with their phones and are intimidated by the whole DSLR photography and editing thing:

This is seriously FUN! It is easy to edit your photos and make them look like little pieces of art. Most of the apps are free- and the ones that aren’t are inexpensive. Try it! You can figure out all of this in an afternoon. Join me on instagram. I’m #melindaroo.

April 23, 2014April 22, 2014

Melinda13 Comments

I love photography. I love my iPhone (I’m on my third!). Why haven’t I gotten more into iPhoneography? I guess the answer is that if I have my big camera with me, that’s what I’m going to use. However, iPhoneography has become a BIG DEAL, and I want to at least dip my toes in that water, so to speak.

I signed up for a little online iPhoneography class and learned about some new apps and got some good tips. I thought I had a lot of apps already, but I have recently learned that there’s a whole world of creative apps I hadn’t discovered yet. I love apps!

Some online photo friends have inspired me to get back on instagram and participate in a 30 day challenge using the Waterlogue app (a cool app that turns your photos into paintings). It’s fun and challenging- and gives me another excuse to play with photos on my phone.

Here’s a selection of some of my instagram photos from this week. The first was edited in Mextures, one of my absolute favorite creative apps, and the others were edited in Waterlogue. In most cases, each photo first went through one of my go-to photo apps, Snapseed and/or Pic-Tap-Go, before the creative apps. FUN!!!

Top row: last night’s downtown sunset, Granite Mountain