2020-07-05: Photo Art – Rhinos

For my Dad’s Father’s Day gift, I adopted a blind rhino named Maxwell, being cared for at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, in his name. Rhino’s were the animal he was most excited to see on our first trip to South Africa, so it seemed like a good fit (and proved to be a very popular gift, as was the elephant I adopted for my Mom for Mother’s Day).

I try to make homemade cards whenever possible, and created these two images to make my Dad’s Father’s Day card. These were done with images I shot my last time in South Africa, using a variety of filters in the Topaz Studio program.

2020-05-24: Artistic Impressions

I’ve had some fun over the last few weeks playing around with some images in Topaz Studio and creating a bit of photo art.  I had been hoping to get out with my camera and capture some of the new birds I have been seeing around, but the weather has definitely not been conducive to that this week.  It seems to be a theme lately that I want to do more with my photography than time allows, but these sort of cycles ebb and flow, and there is no sense in getting all worked up about it.  I’m just happy that I have something to share this week.

Wishing everyone a positive week ahead!

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2020-04-12: Artistic Impressions

Today I felt drawn to play around and create some of my artistic impression images.  There wasn’t any real rhyme or reason to the images I selected; just ones that caught my eye, and that seemed as good a reason as any.

I hope everyone is staying safe and keeping well.

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2020-01-05: Artistic Impressions

It’s the start of a new year, and I’ve not come up with any grand plans for the blog.  In addition to my full time work, I’m starting graduate school and courses towards a professional designation, so I have decided to leave things open for the time being, until I see what type of time and energy I have.  I am hoping to continue on with my Sunday, Monday and Wednesday posting schedule, but I may not end up picking themes for each month, and instead, just go where the mood takes me.  I’m just going to play it by ear for the moment.

I’ve continued to be inspired to play around with my artistic impression images, and have a few of those to share today.

I’ve still not had any success with moving over to Topaz Studio version 2.  When I have played around with it, I have really liked the flow within the program, but have found it challenging to get photos in and out of the software, with my current workflow.  Thankfully, the original version is still working well within my system.

That’s all for today; wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead.

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2019-12-15: Photo Art – Birds

For the last few days, it has been very quiet around the yard in terms of bird life.  While last weekend the chickadees, nuthatches and flickers seemed to be around non-stop, the past few days, even on my walks, I haven’t heard a twitter.

With birds on my mind, I decided to play around with some of my photo art edits for my post this week.  This is a topic that I have worked on previously; if you missed some of the posts from a couple of months ago, here are two links to take a look at:

2019-10-20: Photo Art – Owls

2019-09-15: Photo Arts – Birds

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A saddle billed stork resting along the shore of a small dam.

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A pair of Verreaux’s eagle owls

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A helmeted guinea fowl

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A long-crested eagle perched at the top of a dead tree.

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One of my favourite birds to see on safari, a lilac breasted roller.  Just a little brighter than you may see in real life 🙂

2019-11-17: Artistic Elephants

Before I get to the images I created for this post, my public service announcement for the day: Always make sure you have a backup of your computer!  I made the decision to upgrade my Mac to a new operating system (not the newest one just released, the one before that, as I thought all the bugs would be worked out). Partway through the install, there was a failure and I ended up with a totally dead computer.  Thankfully, I have a pretty good backup strategy, so all I lost was the edit on a single image… And I wasn’t really that happy with the edit, so it isn’t really much of a loss.  I didn’t get to spend my afternoon editing as my computer was busy doing its own thing with the restore function.  But if I hadn’t had that, I would have spent the day seriously freaking out.

Anyways, on to the topic at hand.  I was playing around with elephant images this week, creating some of what I call my photo art or artistic impressions images.  I love elephants as the subject for these types of creations, as their large size allows the subject to still be recognizable, no matter how crazy I go with different filters, textures and techniques.

I had a lot of fun working on these, I hope you enjoy them too.

Have a great week ahead!

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2019-10-20: Photo Art – Owls

I recently saw a beautiful abstract painting of an owl, and it inspired me to work on some of my owl images in a different way.  All of these were created in Topaz Studio, using a variety of different filters and techniques.  It’s been a lot of fun playing around with these this week.

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You can find these images, and lots of others, over on my gallery page.

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