Daily Skies (Part IV)

The only problem with being so obsessed in taking photos of the sky is that my current digital camera is too bulky and unreliable to keep with me at all times. That leaves me with one other option: my phone's camera. It takes ok pictures, and I can pull it out reasonably quickly when I'm driving (which is when most of my photo opportunities happen), but it's not good enough. It can't capture the nuances of color my own eyes see. Plus there are often interesting cloud formations right on the horizon, and they look big to me, but on the phone's display, they are quite small. It's difficult and annoying when my phone simply can't capture what I want it to. A good, portable digital camera is an investment I need to make, and soon.

Case in point, this last image. The way I could see the sky through my own eyes, there was lots of the pink dusting on the underside of the clouds. But in the image my camera took, there is very little. It bugs me. This is an example of both the color limitations and the automatic zoom out/wider angle business I mentioned.

Experiment: Screen-printing (Part VII)

In winter quarter, as well as taking film photography, I took another round of advanced printmaking with the phenomenal Noel Anderson. As is evidenced by my FYASO Friday segments, I love the FYASO meme. It's been burning in my brain to recreate it in art somehow, and so I decided to go with it for printmaking. I thought screen-printing would be most useful and effective. I like the idea of using a handmade process that can be messy, time consuming, and potentially one-of-a-kind to create a physical version of an internet meme. Thi sis because, in contrast, internet memes are quick and spontaneous, created to fit the situation or mood, meat to be more throwaway images. You don't need any editting software to make them; the more popular memes have websites where you can quickly throw words on the image (for example, at memegenerator.net).

First, I tried to replicate the FYASO image with original words.

Then I loosened up and put layers together more haphazardly, letting them fall as they would, to show more of the frustrated feel the Owl often has.

In the second half of the quarter, I worked on images of a sunset. I used many transparent layers of ink to achieve the floating layered clouds. This piece of a good lesson in embracing mistakes and not letting them frustrate me, which is a problem I often have.

Here is a close-up of some of the clouds. I used silver ink in some of the layers.

FYASO Friday

Daily Skies (Part III)

There's a really nifty tool in Adobe Photoshop called Photomerge. In Photoshop (at least in the CS3 version), it can be found in File > Automate > Photomerge. You can choose multiple files to load into the program, and Photoshop will automatically combine them into one large image. I consider myself to be reasonably tech-savvy, but I don't know how Photomerge works. It seems like magic to me.

One day recently, I took a bunch of photos of a colorful, interesting sky, slightly overlapping, for the sole purpose of using Photomerge to create a panoramic view. And here is the end result.

Daily Skies (Part II)

Daily Skies

Because the world is round, it turns me on

Because the world is round...

Because the wind is high it blows my mind
Because the wind is high...
Love is old, love is new
Love is all, love is you
Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry
Because the sky is blue

(The Beatles, "Because")

While I will not be posting daily, I do take reference photos of the sky every day. And so I thought it would be neat to show a handful of them every week. There are primarily taken from my phone camera, as that is the most convenient to have with me at all times. Consequently, the photos don't really capture the sky as I see it; my phone camera is too weak to see all the colors like my eyes do. But it's what I have at my disposal, and I still have my memory.