Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Gloomy Day Iris's

I have been waiting for weeks for my iris's on the pond to bloom. Seems like I have checked on them daily since their green leaves popped out of the water and reached for the sun. It has been raining in North Texas and we need it to get out of our drought, but my flowers want some sunshine!

Suddenly, it seems, they have bloomed and I head out back to take some pics without mosquito spray on. Bad Idea! I think I have malaria! Kidding aside, I shot out a few pics in between bites, without a much of a care for how they came out since I knew I could "fix" them...

Here are some straight out of the camera shots ... this one is a tinge blue...


Between the clouds and the mosquitoes, I am not ashamed to say that I did not do a great job setting up my shots....patience, I will have to learn. Bug spray can help.

This shot I did not do any post processing except for cropping. It is an ode to O'Keeffe. 


Was that a stretch? I think not! On this next one I played around with the contrast and brightness. Upped the brightness and upped the contrast for a more dramatic look. It makes the yellow pop.


I finished up playing with the Irises by taking this photo (which is a little on the blue-gray side) and lightened it up a bit and upped the contrast like I did with the previous photo...
So it went from this... 


to this...

But I wanted a more "dreamy" look to it. Or Shabby Chic. Or Cottage Chic. Or Vintage. Whatever the terms are for the moment. I added a texture layer of some scratchy scricty sepia texture that looks like this:


You can find textures by Sarah Gardner on her website. (LOVE HER WORK!) She has some free downloads to try out and if you follow her blog sometimes there are others for free. http://www.sarahgardnertextures.com/

Adding the texture to the photo and playing some more with the brightness and contrasts I came up with this photo. I also did add a little bevel to the edge to make it, well, edgy.



This Iris artwork and other artworks are for sale in my ETSY store here:

I hope you enjoyed following along with my Iris photo journey. Until next time I hope you can take a gloomy day and make it bloom!!
Michele


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