Our Always Changing Office

Our office for Bluebonnet Memories and DFW Fine Art Photography and Printing is always a work in progress. Here are some of our latest images.

Printing Your Images and Art Work are a Passion and Expertise for Us.

Let us refine and print your images for you. We are able to print up to 40″ plus on the short side. The long side is only limited to the length of our media. Rolls are usually 20 to 100 feet.

The size of work we can do for you depends in the resolution of your native image.

There are many ways to display your art work. Please come by our office to see ideas on how to show off your art.

Texas Color with Smart Phone

This year Texas has a lot of color. Here is one I captured yesterday with my cell phone and a little help from a Adobe Photoshop Plug called Topaz. I had a good camera with me without a memory card. I blame the confusion on being 70! :-)

Our blessings in colors are all around Texas this year. I understand that Lost Plains State Park is a great place near Bastrop is a great place to catch Texas Color.

Creativity After the PhotoShoot

Bird Houses

Here I have simply made a selection and inverted it to save the color of the Bird House and made the rest back and white. I suggest the use of inexpensive software from ADOBE called Photoshop Elements for the beginner.

Next is picture taken while moving in a car. Ok, my wife was driving! I snapped the pic as we drove by.

After I cropped the tractor, cloned the white container out and tweaked the colors here is the resulting image. Not a great picture but far better than the first

In the jar image we simply tweaked the colors added a border.

Software like Adobe Photoshop elements or freeware that you can download from the internet is amazing and easy to use. You may turn your masterpiece into a painting or sketch or a million other ideas.

These are just a few suggestions of how anyone can make an image more interesting by simply using a little ingenuity.

This little quip is not aimed at pros that know far more than me. However the overall theme is to visit doing what you have never done. It’s to experiment and play. In essence it to get out of the box and to use that amazing mind God has given you.

Best Wishes!

PS We might do a series on simple shooting techniques soon.

Images Natural or Manipulated

Natural or Assisted Images have long been a topic of often heated discussion. Some enjoy images that relatively untouched. Others relish images that fit their taste for vibrant color and contrasts. Some want images that compliment their decor in office or home.

From my perspective their are no right or wrong answers. Just as we are diverse in natures, art form is expressed in many ways.

We do a lot or art shows. We have heard some say the they would like pictures just the way they were, just like Ansel would have taken. Those who are into photography know that a large part of Adam’s creativity was what he did in the darkroom after the shot. What we see appeals to our eye but not necessarily to the original view.

The big question is what images we enjoy most. What do we want in our homes or offices.

Lighting by Car Headlights

When heading out from the “Barn” in Maize KS my headlights lit up their antique wagons. I couldn’t help pulling out my camera to see what kind of image I could get. Granted I did a little Dodge and Burn in Photoshop but the end result was a least fun.

You might give your headlights a try for lighting when you are out and about.

Depth of Field, When You Want It and When You Don’t

In simple terms Depth of Field is how much you want in focus in a scene.

In most cases you will use a high FStop (a smaller aperture) number for landscape photos getting both foreground and background in focus.

When taking close up shots you may want to highlight your subject and limit the Depth of Field which blurs the background. You will use a lower FStop Number (a larger aperture).

However there are always exceptions based on what you want the viewer to see. There may be good reasons to use more or less Depth of Field in any situation.

I was taught the the higher the Fstop number always gave a more pleasing landscape shot. But not truly so. Most cameras give the most pleasing shot at around f14. The actual number varies a bit with each camera.

Sometimes we must use a different fstop than we might desire. The ambient light has a practical bearing on what fStop we use. Less light the more we will need to open our aperture. Remember the fStop number is inverse to opening of the lens or aperture. So for lower light we will use smaller fStop numbers which open our shutter allowing more light into the camera. With brighter light we will us higher fStop Number narrowing our shutter.

In most cases we most often use higher fStop numbers for landscapes and lower for close up subjects like flowers or portraits.

For Illustration you will see that I used a low FStop (about the f4 range) for the Pomegranate to blur the background and highlight the plant. In the case of the landscape picture I used about a f14 to give more focus throughout the image.