Mistakes are part of the journey…

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I decided to share some of the worst photos I took when I was spraying water with a mister bottle onto spider webs, thereby making fake dew. It evolved, as my ideas tend to do, and the next thing I knew, it was night, and I was in my yard, spraying webs, and then holding a flashlight and then a laser pointer under the webs with one hand, while trying to snap pictures with the camera in my other hand.

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I already shared the ones that worked. I really thought that if I wiggled the laser around, I would get some awesome effects.

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I should have had someone hold the laser.

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I just couldn’t hold the camera still enough, or focus correctly.

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But these might be leading me closer to some great photos.

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We will have to see.

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I also learned not to use the flash. That just makes it worse.

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Even during the day, I am still learning how to do this. Some combination of settings and lens will let me have more of the web in focus.

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I mean, that is a perfectly nice picture. A little blurry. That is why I often resort to cropping to the focused parts, or, even better, doing digital magic to the photo…

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… and ending up with the very first perfectly symmetrical spider web.

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The camera just doesn’t want to focus on small, clear drops of water or thin webs. It likes the background better.

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Or sometimes, there is a dog hair in your photo.

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Or that annoying spot, up near the top, which seems to be on an inside lens of my camera, because I can’t clean it off. I learned that I have to go to a camera shop and pay somebody to do it.

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Some sunsets; sum sunsets, sun somesets, some sonsets, somesunsets…

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I call that one: ‘dinner at sunset’.

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I call that one: a photo of a sunset.

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I don’t really go to the trouble of naming all my photos.

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That would be silly.

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I am not sure if that classifies as a sunset or not. More of a sunbeam thing.

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But the sun was sinking lower. It was a pre-sunset warm up.

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And no, these were not all taken on the same day… but it is the same sun.

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Well, that isn’t a sunset at all. It was morning. But we had some weird cloud cover.

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It was one of those weird weather days, when you don’t know if it is going to rain or hail or typhoon or tornado.

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But no, none of that happened.

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Catching up with my life…

Sometimes I get so caught up in whatever weird photography/digital art things I am posting about, I forget to post about how weird my life is.

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I finished a new tiki.

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It isn’t the most exciting one I ever made. I just wanted to try one that was all straight lines.

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I pulled another batch of dirt out of my compost bin.

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It is dark and rich, the color of dark roast coffee. It smells like life. I make dirt as good as mother nature does.

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I took a knife-skills class, to hone my vegetable chopping skills. Ha, see what I did there?

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I am now a vegetable slicing ninja!

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It was fun.

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My dogs are still practicing being cute.

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This one is getting pretty good at it.

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I saw a red tail hawk.

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I went back out to the pottery studio where my daughter and I took a lesson. I had to glaze my bowls.

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Hmmmm… what colors should I use.

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The one on the bottom is one the glazes. The other two are my bowls. l know, they look like something a child made in art class. But wait until the glaze is baked in the kiln. Supposedly, depending on how you layer it, you get different effects. Those are not the colors that will appear when they are fired. But I did patterns as under layers. I did a black wave pattern at the bottom of the outside of one bowl. Then I did blue over it, thinner at the bottom and thicker at the top. If I did it right, the waves will show through the blue glaze. I will share some pictures after they are finished.

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Faces in the darkness… the final chapter… unless you want me to do some digital magic on them and make them even weirder, in which case, leave me a comment to that effect…

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If you are sick of these it won’t hurt my feelings.

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I mean, not very much.

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Technically I already did some digital magic on them when I took them into Photoshop and mirror-imaged them.

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Which is why they look like weird faces and not just a photo of a moon showing through some tree branches.

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But we could make them glowing neon, or shifting rainbow colors.

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We could turn them into surrealist paintings or stick them in reflecting water.

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We could inflate them, or twirl them or liquefy them.

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Or make them purple or blue.

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That one looks like a snake head. That would look cool coming out of water. Just sayin’.

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Leave a comment and let me know which way you are leaning.

 

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Wet webs and digital magic… part 8…

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I call that one; ‘I heart wet webs’. I had mirror-imaged it, and noticed the heart, but I had to flip the entire image on its side to make the heart face the right way.

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Silly drunk spiders.

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Web face.

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It reminds me of chameleon’s eye. I call the one; ‘A reptile dysfunction’.

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And there you have the secret of how I get the webs wet with fake dew. I know, I have been telling you that I use a small misting spray bottle. But I actually take the entire web down, holding it very carefully, and dip it into the magic pond in my garden. I call that one; ‘Really wet web’.

And lastly, the original photo I took that I used for all the other images in this post…

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Wet webs and digital magic… part 7… special ‘dark web’ edition…

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Yes, they are still my photos of webs that I misted with fake dew… but I only used dark and sinister digital magic this time.

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That gave me a chance to turn the term ‘dark web’ into something less sinister in my title.

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It is still art, but now it is a dark art… HA! I crack me up.

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Anyway…

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Here they are…

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More weird stuff…

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Brought to you by me and the crack squirrels that live in my head.

Here is the original photo I took…

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Wet webs and digital magic… part 6…

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Okay, you know the drill…

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I am taking those photos I took of wet spider webs…

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And working a little digital magic on them.

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This is pretty easy to do.

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It took me longer to spray the fake dew on the webs and take the pictures.

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So, not only do I end up with awesome art, but I have the cleanest spiders in the neighborhood.

Here is the original image I used for all of these…

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Is it just me, or does it seem like there is a dark cloud hanging over tRump and the White House?

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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Faces in the darkness… part 4…

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And here is the mirror image I made without the rain effect…

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Just your typical zombie-Ent.

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Faces in the darkness… part 3…

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Uh oh, I guess maybe burning trees aren’t as funny as I first thought. But here is the original mirror image I made…

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