Archives
A Sample of Pop’s “Bee” Images

Tuliptree Blossom with Guest

Another Day at Work

Apis Workers' Party

Predator

Some of Your Beeswax

Sedum Bumbler

Look of Defiance

Chicory Bee

Bumbling Bees

Garden Cafe

Buzz By Here - To Infinity and Beyond

Pick Your Poison

Blind Side Attack

On a Mission

Honey Bee on Sedum

Covering the Cosmos

Center of the Cosmos

Three's a Crowd

Popular Spot

On A Pedestal

A Sample of Pop’s “People” Photo Collection

Big Harry Fireworks Display

To Impress the Girl

Different Perspective

Sweet Ride

Perfect Little Piggies B&W

Flipping the Light Fantastic

Festival of Flights

To the Crowd's Delight

Amish Go Round

Wondersome One

The Stars In Her Eyes

Tuesday's Child

Sleeper Hold

Considering the Next Move

Sugar and Spice

Front Porch Portrait

Caged Competitor

Early Adoration

Child In the Ligtht

Stroll Through the Weeds

Attention Grabbing

Eye Contact

On the Line

Eyes of Wonder

Rounding the Curve

Troubadours of Basin Spring Park

Down by the Creek

Sun Day

Catching Some Light

EAA Fireworks

Hear Me Roar

FotoSketcher

Hollyhocks in Digital Paint

Digital Effect, Flowers, Oil Painting, Hollyhocks
One of the things I love about digital photos is the way you can easily manipulate the images. I almost never post a photo straight out of the camera.  There’s always tweaking to be done.  It might be simply cropping the image for maximum effect, straightening a crooked image, correcting the color, contrast, brightness, etc.  Even beyond making a photo look it’s best, you can easily make a photo look totally different. This is a perfect example.

The other day I returned a book to the Algoma Public Library and on my way in I noticed a group of hollyhocks.  My artist’s eye thought that would be a good image to experiment on.  I liked the colors and the texture of the stone wall behind them.  To the right is the original photo I snapped.  I left myself plenty of room to crop it.  When I look at the original, I really don’t see anything particularly special about these flowers.

I opened the image in Photoshop and tweaked the brightness and contrast, cropped it, then saved it.  I then opened up another image editing software called FotoSketcher.  It’s a free program I recently found and am just starting to play with. It allows you to convert a digital photo to a variety of different art styles, such as pencil sketch, oil pastel, watercolors, etc.  It also has a number of options for aging a photo, increasing saturation and adding a frame or text.

I imagine any real artist who works with oils would probably snicker and scoff at this type of creation. Yet, if I were to actually pick up a paint brush or pastels, you’d get a lot of stick-people level images.  Not being familiar with those kind of mediums, I really don’t know what I’m doing with things like brush size, number of strokes, edge intensity and such, so I trust the software to do the heavy lifting.  There are a lot of adjustments the software allows you to make.  I just fiddle around until I find something that appeals to me.  A true artist, could probably do much better.

On the image above, I simply selected one of the oil painting modes and fiddled.

My artistic medium is digital photography, and I don’t expect that to change, but adding another digital twist to the images and a free tool to the digital tool box keeps things interesting.

If you’re interested in the FotoSketcher software (remember, it’s Free) you can down load it here: http://www.fotosketcher.com/

To see a larger version of the main image at the top of this post, simply click on it.