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I’m a member of 8 That Create, the brain child of artist Sue Bleiweiss.  Part of our mission is to encourage our individual artist journeys.  Our first joint journey is the creation of a piece under the theme, “Empty Spaces.” Because of my darn back woes, I haven’t contributed as much as I should have. However, I have finally finished the digital end of my piece which I am calling “Faith.”

"Faith," ©2012 Gloria Hansen

This is the piece prior to being stitched. You can read about the process of how I went from a very basic idea to this finished digital collage.  The post is called, “The evolution of “Faith” – my empty spaces piece, and you can find it here.

I decided to take the original watercolor I painted into Photoshop and play around with it. Initially I was going to redo his snout. Instead, I decided to see what type of funky things I could do with it. In the above, I brightened up the colors.

I changed him to black/white.
And then gave him more texture.
Here he has half tone dots going on.

And here a warp glass look.

Here’s I amplified the colors, making him computer dog.

I like this one.

Here I duplicated the image, reflected and overlapped it.

Here I duplicated it, flipped it, and repeated a couple times.  Yes, it’s has a hokey kaleidoscope effect. Even so, I like it. I thought I might print it out. Upon closer inspection, some of my overlaps are a bit off and messy. If I do anything with it, I’ll need to redo the steps and take more care.

At a Wells Fargo bank

Washington, D.C. building

Washington, D.C. building

Washington, D.C. building

Notice the reflection of the Washington Monument in the bottom row of windows.

Washington, D.C. building

Metro station

Metro station

Metro station

Metro station

Union Station

Union Station

Union Station

I like the title, Reflections and Perspectives.  It sounds like a good name for an exhibit or a book.  Hmm … mental note to self.  In any event,  I’m hoping that some of these photos provide inspiration or even end up in future artwork.  We’ll see!

I took these pictures in and around The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

The White House

The Jefferson Memorial

The Courtyard of The National Portrait Gallery

The Air and Space Museum

The Potomac River

The Lincoln Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial

Lincoln Memorial

The Butterfly Pavilion at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum

The Washington Monument

The Washington Monument

I’ve been away in Washington, D.C. to attend Photoshop World. I’ve been going yearly for more than a decade, but it’s fun. I’ll talk more about Photoshop CS6 in a future post.  Derry and I arrived by train early on Thursday, when the weather was very warm (in the 80s). The pre-conference didn’t start until Friday afternoon; thus we had all day Thursday and a good part of Friday to take in the City. Over the weekend, while we were busy taking at the conference, it rained and was windy. By Monday the rain cleared, the conference was over, and we were able to take in more of the City.  However, by then, nearly all of the Cherry Blossoms were gone!

7:50 a.m. and off to the local Target (it’s a much farther drive to the Apple store), making it prior to the 8 a.m. opening time.  There was a line of about 12 or so people, which was sort of exciting (and luckily nothing like the incredibly long lines Derry and I use to stand on for hours and hours waiting for Steve Jobs to talk at a keynote!)  The doors opened, and we all headed to the electronics department where the security guard told us to form a line.  A manager had narrow strips of white paper noting the various models available.  When it was my turn, they did not have the model I wanted. What to do, what to do. Off to the local Walmart. Amazingly, they had it.  Bought it. Back home, and back to work.

I have the original iPad, and I didn’t buy the second generation because I really like the first. I use it every day, and I use it exclusively when away to keep up with business, to work with images, and so on. However, Rich discovered how much he likes it and we often have a tug of war over it.  It’s his birthday today. Darn convenient! I figured if I was able to walk into a store and buy one, then it was time for him to have mine.  And have mine he now does, complete with some car racing apps that I am so glad I didn’t download earlier!  The great thing is he is really enjoying it, which is very cool (this is a man who had any zero interest in computers).

If you’re wondering, yes the image quality is noticeably improved, which is darn surprising considering how good the quality was to begin with. No doubt about it, it is gorgeous.

To illustrate, I used my phone to take a couple pictures of both ipads displaying the same photograph of a butterfly picture I took last year.  The new iPad image is on top, the old iPad image is underneath.  Both are straight from the phone, exactly as it was captured (plus my little url stamp).

from the new iPad

from the original iPad

The device is nothing short of magic.  If you can, treat yourself to one.  It’s incredibly useful, but also fun.  Another option is the iPad 2, which was cut in price or the original iPad, which you can probably find for even less money (and which is still magical). What a cool time we live in!

These are some pixs that I took using the Olloclip lens with an iPhone 4s.  As mentioned in the post below, I bought it while at Macworld in San Francisco. The images with the wild colors were taken using the HD setting, and a couple from the plane are out of focus as a result, but still kind of interesting looking.  The cable car was taken at night but with a lot of store lighting.  These are all pre-Camera Awesome.

The evening my sister and I were in NYC, we both decided to take some pictures with our iPhones before we caught the train back to NJ.  We downloaded a newish app called Camera Awesome. It’s free, and it’s very cool. If you don’t have it, go download it and try it out. More on that below. These pictures were taken with my iPhone and a small add-on lens that I bought while at MacWorld. It’s called an Olloclip. It’s a three-in-one lens that includes a fisheye (which I used for these photos), a macro, and a wide angle. While the macro works well, I find it’s a pain to use because you need to screw off the wide angle lens to access it. With everything being so small, I’m fairly certain that I would misplace it in a nano-second. Thus, I keep the wide angle screwed on at all times. The Olloclip fits both the iPhone 4 and 4s, and it’s a lot of fun to use.

I’ll put up some pictures that I took with the Olloclip while in San Francisco. Some, especially those I took shooting through the window on the airplane while flying back home, are very cool.

I like the effect. It’s very snow globe looking.

Camera Awesome has many very cool features. It’s hard to believe the app is free. It’s made by the folks who give you SmugMug so it also gives you the ability to upload to that service as well as other social media sites. It has many useful features (editing tools, filters, image stabilization, a timer, sharing tools).  My favorite feature, however, is the ability to set a focus point and a metering point. Nice! The top left photo is taken with the iPhone camera, and the lights are blown out (yes, I know the lights are blown out on some of the fish eye photos). The photo on the right was taken with Camera Awesome and the wide angle Ottoclip lens; I moved the metering point near the lights while setting the focus on the Empire State Building. I wanted to experiment more, but we had a train to catch and we had to be fast.

This is the construction work going on at Madison Square Garden and Penn Station.
 

These shots of the Empire State Building and the New Yorker hotel were processed on my iPad. The above shows the original and two images of each made by using a couple filters. The differences are subtle, but it was fun playing. The power of many camera apps (and art apps) is mind-boggling. I still use Photoshop daily for work and large scale digital paintings, but I’m using it less and less for processing photos. I find myself wondering what will happen with Photoshop in the future. I’ve been using it for nearly two decades so I am extremely comfortable with it. However, it’s a program that presents new users with quite a learning curve (and price tag). I suspect many will stop using it and even Elements because the types of things it is often used for — resizing, editing, special effects — can be easily done for far less money.  And did you see iPhoto for the iPad that was announced today? Wow!  For $4.95?? That app is sweet!  And, how exciting, new iPad on the 16th!!

I took a day off from work during the week so that my sister and I could go to NYC.  She mainly wanted to buy fabric, and I was up for some shopping, so we hit the garment district.  First on the list was Mood.  Then we went a couple trim stores, an art store on 57th (which I enjoyed the best), back to the garment district for another trim store.  Important to mention is the  fantastic pizza we had at John’s Pizza at 44th.  Yummy and highly recommended!!

When this commercial came on, our dog Budz went right up to the TV and sat in front of it, his nose nearly on the glass.  He watched and then his head cocked to one side, then the other, then back again. When one dog in the commercial started to howl, and then another, Budz joined in with them. It was so funny! I went to get my iphone to video him. Rather than hit the rewind on the TV to hopefully get a repeat of it, I inadvertently changed the channel knocking the commercial out of the buffer. Drats! I haven’t seen the commercial since, and the YouTube video doesn’t have the same effect on him.  If you haven’t seen this excellent commercial for Volkswagen, watch it.  And may the force be with you!

An extraordinary man is having his funeral services today in England.  Sadly, I cannot be there to celebrate his life amongst his friends and family.  Instead, I am remembering here, as well as always in my heart: Michael Thompson, father to Derry Thompson, my very good friend and business co-founder.

Derry and his dad, Mike

There is a common greeting on the east coast, especially in NJ, and depending on where you live,  it can be anything from a proper “How are you doing” to something more like on the TV show, The Sopranos, a slurred together almost hushed “How ya doIN?” to something more like what Joey on the TV show Friends would say, “How YOU doin?”  But no matter how I asked the question, Mike always gave me the same answer:   “Aces.”  If it was raining out, he was aces.  Sunny, he was aces.  If he lost at golf, he was still aces.  Year after year, he was aces.

Sometimes he answered me in brief, “I’m aces, Gloria.  I’m Aces.”  Other times he would elaborate, “I’m aces, Gloria.  I’m the luckiest man alive.  I have a wonderful family, good friends, good health, and enough money for my meager needs.”  He never said it in a boastful way, but a simple, matter of fact way.  “I’m Aces.”

While I am, as they say, on the other side of the pond, my mind is flooded with thoughts and emotions. I am remembering how exceptionally kind he was to me — the dinners, stories, and the many cups of tea we shared.   I am remembering how involved he was with so many things — golf four days a week, French lessons, table tennis, traveling, seeing shows in London, being on quiz teams, or spending time with his beloved family.  I am remembering my admiration for his determination in completing each day’s crossword puzzle, and I had always hoped that I could finally provide a helpful answer rather than my usual wide-eyed, deer caught in the headlights response.  Most of all I am remembering his upbeat demeanor and his ability to so fully appreciate his life.

A few years back he took a trip to the mid-west, and arranged to stay with a family in the Tennessee area.  He took a detour when he saw a sign for Paducah, remembering I had a quilt in the National Museum.  He saw the quilt, and I haven’t even seen it there yet!  I remember him telling me of the rain and floods.  He described how his rental car broke down, and how the people he was staying with had no electricity.  As I listened I said, “It sounds like it was the vacation from hell.”  He looked at me and said quite sincerely said, “Oh no.  It was all good fun.  I thoroughly enjoyed myself.”  I asked, really?  “Yes.  Thumbs up, aces.” Never in my life did I ever meet anyone who on any given day was always feeling aces.

When my mom met Mike this past summer, she said she was glad to finally meet him and then asked, “How are you doing?”  “Aces,” he answered.  “I’m the luckiest man in the world.”  Recognizing that she wasn’t expecting such an answer, he went on to elaborate:  “It’s all about good friends and family, isn’t it.  And I have wonderful children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. I have it all.”  And have it all he did.

Derry’s dad was the true definition of gentleman and scholar, and I loved and admired him so. I am forever grateful that I had the opportunity to spend time with such an inspiring man: Mike, the man who was always aces.

Woohooo … !!!