My amaryllises are still going strong, but I think this may be their last hurrah for the year. The three bulbs have been providing cheer continuously since the beginning of December. I’m not generally a great lover of red but the weather has been cloudy and I’ve really been enjoying the different shades of red and the way the light plays on the petals.
You can see the buds in the lower left corner. The first shall be last.
Being an amateur on a fixed income I haven’t sprung for the Adobe Photoshop software. I wondered if I could create a similar effect in the GIMP. GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. It is shareware, which means the price right.
A bit of internet research and experimentation today led me to this process:
Step 1: Load my photo.
This picture seems to radiate out from the center of the flower. I thought it might make an interesting twirl.
Step not taken:
Both Julie Powell’s directions and the video on Brashley photos post use a Photoshop filter in the pixelate menu called “mezzotint”. The GIMP doesn’t have that choice near that in its pixelize filter. There is a GIMP plug in to get the effect, but I decided to see what would happen without that step. I was in the mood to play with pretty things, not be a computer geek..maybe next week.
Step 2: Zoom Motion Blur
Filters>Blur>Zoom motion blur. I moved the center to the middle of the flower and cranked the blurring factor up to 0.515 and left the other parameters at default.
Step 3: Repeat step 2
Same settings as for step 2 were used.
If you wanted you could repeat this again.
Step 4: A positive spin on it
I made a copy of the step 3 layer and applied Filters>Distorts>Whirl and Pinch using the default settings to get this:
Whirled and pinched.
Step 5: A negative spin on it
I mad another duplicate of the step 3 image, moved it above the layer from step 4, and again used the Filter>Distorts>Whirl and Pinch, but for this layer I made the angle negative (I forgot to jot down the exact number, but I think it was around -200).
A negative spin on it.
Step 6: Experiment with blend modes
Not much to say about this, I just tested all of the various blend modes on the layer made in step 5 until I found ones I liked. Here are my two favorites:
Lighten only blend mode.Addition blend mode.
Summary
It was fun to give this a try and the GIMP was quite easy to use to get the twirled effect. So much so that I may become addicted to abstraction.
On a gray day it seems like the red of the tulips glows.
Since I started with red lines I thought I’d end with them as well. I feel like I ran a marathon posting every day for a month. Maybe the habit will stick and I’ll be more regular in the future.
Many thanks to Becky of Winchester for hosting this great challenge. I learned a lot about composition as I looked at people’s squares this month and spent time reshaping my own pictures to look at least okay as squares.
Close up of a leaf. This one couldn’t decide what color it wanted to be.I don’t remember what kind of flower this was, but the seed pods look like stars.Even the lowly blackberry is putting on a show.
This is an art installation at Carlisle Castle called “Poppies: Weeping Window” in remembrance of the lives lost in World War One. The 100th anniversary of Armistice Day is this year. In the USA we often forget it’s origin because we call it “Veteran’s Day” and it has become a more general celebration of appreciation for those who serve in the armed forces. Can you imagine how difficult it must have been to arrange all of those individual ceramic poppies?
Red seems to dominate any picture it is in. For someone who doesn’t really care for red I seem to have a lot of pictures where it dominates the composition:
Irish pony and stop sign.
Red plow at a folk life museum in County Kerry.
Red prayer ribbons at Tian Hao Temple in Qingdao, China.
May 4th sculpture in Qingdao, China.
Lanterns and shan zha (hawthorn) on National Day in Weifang China.
Prayer ribbons on a fence at a temple on Taishan, Shandong Province, China.
Food street in Weifang, China.
Stop sign at Glacier National Park, Montana
Red bus tour bus at Glacier National Park.
Red peppers at a market in Shouguang, China.
Red lace leaf maple at the arboretum at South Seattle College.
Kite at Weifang International Kite Festival, China/
I don”t like red all that much, so I was surprised to see how many pictures I have where it is the star. These were all taken last April, most of them in China, where red is auspicious.
