I’m having way too much fun manipulating photos. I have a pair I want to share. The first photo is the image as it was taken by the camera. The second photo is the same image and all that I did was hit “sharpen” about a million times and this is what it became.

Tags: creativity, fotoflexer, photo editing, photography

Over on Crochet Concupiscence I’m doing a 365 Project where I wear crochet every day and photograph my outfit in a fashion style post. Mostly I’m doing this to show off contemporary crochet but as an aside I want to use this project to get better at both taking and editing photos. I know very little about this but I’m having a lot of fun learning. Right now my favorite free online tool for editing photos is Fotoflexer.

Mostly I just use the editor to make the colors on a photo look a little bit better or to make the image a little bit sharper. But I’m discovering that you can do some really fun art things with this tool. For example, I played with the Pop Art feature, changing the fade on it, to turn a basic image into a fun art image. Look:

So fun!

Tags: fotoflexer, photo editing, photography

This morning I woke up earlier than I would have liked. It was one of those mornings when you’re still too tired to get up and do anything but you’re not quite tired enough to actually go back to sleep. I tried reading for awhile (am almost done with The Knitting Circle) but decided that wasn’t feeling right so I switched over to watching a documentary on Netflix instead. The documentary was called Naked States and was about the work of a photographer named Spencer Tunick. Thought-provoking little piece of art.

Tunick had a goal of going around the country and taking photographs of nude people in public spaces in ever single state in the continental United States. He didn’t seem to set any specific goals about how many people would show up to be photographed or where specifically he wanted to capture his images. Some of the things he did seem to establish as goals or parameters for himself included:

• The nudity would be total nudity and wouldn’t include things like shoes, jewelry or hats in the images.
• He would get the people for each shoot by going around the area when he arrived and asking people to participate.
• The shots would be done early in the morning in public spaces. Some of these would be famous spaces (like the Boston Public Library) but many would be random, urban, industrial spots that he found. He didn’t want to do “pretty” shots or a lot of nature shots.
• The images would provide a lot of contrast in them. He poses large people with small people, black with white, etc.
• At some point he did seem to want to get a lot of people involved. He achieved this when he shot at a Phish concert and had more than 1000 naked people participate.

Naked States shows how an art project goes from an idea to a gallery show. It shows how you have to believe in your own artwork, go out there and create it, promote it while staying true to the vision of it and then eventually network it into a show. It shows how people who are helping you may get frustrated with you, bicker with you, doubt you. It shows, in other words, what it’s like to be a working artist today. It’s a cool flick. I’d Netflix it again.

Tags: art documentary, documentary, naked states, photography, public nudity, smartchick

One of my favorite things about social networking is that you can learn about stuff that you might never have discovered on your own. Case in point – someone I know posted a question about lomography and I got curious about what that is so I started looking into it. It turns out that it’s a form of photography that got popular in the 1990′s and actually looks like it’s really cool.

What I’ve learned about lomography so far:

• It uses a specific, unique type of camera. In this way it is kind of like Polaroid photography where the camera itself helps make it fall into the niche that it is in.
• It is astoundingly colorful. I don’t know if this is because of the camera or the film or the way that the film is processed or what but the pictures are always really colorful and I love the look that they have because of this.
• It’s all about spontaneous shooting. It’s not about figuring out specific shutter speeds or waiting to capture the ideal moment. It’s about “shooting from the hip”, photographing people who might not want you to do so and playing around with what you’re doing. I love this idea!
• Lomographers love close-ups. This is a very human art because the best pictures are pictures of people taken as close to them as you can get.

Tags: 90s fads, art, lomography, photography

Yesterday’s photo was of the big cross on Mt. Davidson. What I didn’t mention was that the cross is in the middle of a eucalyptus grove. So pretty:

Tags: eucalytpus, mt. davidson, nature, photography, Photos, trees

There was something that I just loved about the perspective of this lamp post against the building. It was taken in San Francisco’s Financial District as I was on my way somewhere. I think I’m gradually getting better at this photo thing. What do you think?

Tags: buildings, lamp, photo, photography

Sutro Tower is a sight to be seen. It’s impossible to ignore this structure that towers above the city of San Francisco, peeking it’s head above the fog even when there’s nothing else to be seen through the mist. What I love about this picture is that the perspective of it miniaturizes this towering creature and focuses instead on the tree in the forefront. What do you think of this one?

Tags: kathryn vercillo, nature, perspective, photography, Photos, smartchick, sutro tower, tree

I am head over heels in love with San Francisco. I am passionate about the city where I live. I have known since before I first came here that this was the place where I was going to make my life and create my world. When I tell people that I have found “the one” and they learn that I am talking about a city, they have one of two reactions.

The first reaction comes from those people who have also had this experience, often from people who also live in San Francisco and feel this same way about the city. They get this knowing look in their eyes and we don’t have to say anything more about it because the understanding is just there. It’s the same as when you find “the one” person that you want to love forever and you tell that to someone else who has had that experience. You both just relate to each other through that common shared human experience.

And then there is the other reaction which comes from those people who have not found the city that resonates for them like San Francisco does for me. It is an amused reaction or a befuddled reaction. It comes along with statements like, “yeah but it’s so expensive in San Francisco” or questions like, “don’t you think you’ll want to try out other cities someday?”

To someone who has truly fallen in love with a place, these reactions just seem ridiculous. Yes, the rent is expensive and there are a dozen other things that aren’t great about San Francisco but don’t you see that I love everything about her despite some flaws? And why would I look for something else when I feel so incredibly absolutely safe and at home here in this city.

Not everyone gets to find “the one” – in romance or in a hometown. But nobody should ever stop looking because if you do find it, your whole life is altered. This happened to me with San Francisco. I got the chance to write about it a bit for a collaborative photo project that I was a part of here recently. The project is called I Live Here: SF and it’s photos of the people who live here and mostly love it here. Check it out to see the cool creative people that live in this city, the collaboration of those people’s words with the photographer’s pictures and the passion that exists when people truly do fall in love with the place where they live.

Tags: cities, creativity, i live here sf, i love sf, kathryn vercillo, love, photography, projects, San Francisco

I had a really great time yesterday having my picture taken for a cool photo project that’s happening in San Francisco. I’ll be telling you more about that next week but if you’re interested in what it might be then you should check out the website I Live Here: SF which is the platform for the project.

What I want to talk about now is digital cameras. The photographer who came over is a very cool woman who is one of those people that you can tell is just totally herself. And just one simple example of this is that she uses a basic digital camera that isn’t some big fancy schmancy thing.

During the photo shoot, her batteries went dead. When my battery goes dead on my fancy camera, I have to stop taking pictures, take out the battery, recharge it for several hours and then (if I’m lucky) resume what I’m doing. She just popped out her AA batteries, put in new ones and kept on shooting. There’s something to be said for the convenience of that.

Sometimes we don’t need to get the fanciest new gadget out there to create our art work. Sometimes it makes a whole lot more sense to get the item that is right for us regardless of what other people are using or what others think of what we use.

I wrote an article today comparing 7 different 5 MP Cameras. What you can see just from this brief article is that there’s a big difference in the cameras that are out there even when you’re looking at the same megapixel range. There are camera phones, cute cameras, cameras with multiple shooting modes, cameras with cool zoom features … so what matters isn’t that you get the camera with the right megapixels but rather that you get the camera you want.

Tags: 5mp camera, art, cameras, choosing a camera, creativity, design, digital camera, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, photography