52Frames Dreamscape Weekly Photo Challenge

The subject this week for the 52Frames photo challenge was “dreamscape.” Since I have been using my Procreate digital art app to help create some of these photos for the challenges, I thought I may need to use it for this one. That meant it would be a compilation of at least two or three photos. And that also meant that I would have to have something in mind. I really didn’t have anything in mind but figured I would just take pictures of different things and hope that they could somehow be connected and used together to create this masterpiece. So last week at the neighborhood park we walked past some beautiful flowering dogwood. It took a photo of that. When we were leaving the park we came upon the bridge - so I took a picture of that after also taking a few images of other paths in the park. When I came home I started playing around with the photos. The first thing was to upload the background shot of the bridge. Then the image was transformed using a blur function to make it look a bit out of focus. Then I remembered we had witnessed a bridal couple from the third floor of our family’s warehouse in central Virginia on a walkabout after the ceremony. So I cut them out of the photo and added them to the bridge. Then the couple was made a bit transparent to again create a dreamlike scene. But the image still needed something more - and that’s where the dogwood came in. The flowers were cut out of the photo, turned, and enlarged to take up the lower half of the overall image. The green centers of the flowers nicely coordinated with the green from then trees and grass. And the lighting was very pretty. After cropping the photo here and there the final product looked really pretty - and dreamy - to me. So it’s not exactly one photo using camera and setting manipulations, but three images combined in to one. It takes a bit of time to edit the photos and then create an image. If nothing else this whole process keeps me busy - which is a good thing. 

52Frames_Dreamscape

This week I needed to think of a photo for the subject matter “dreamscape,” and extra credit would be “nightmare.” The first thing that came to mind was the light tunnel in the National Gallery of Art that connects the east to the west side underground. So we drove in to town, parked on the national mall, and started our morning walk. We have been going to the gallery so often lately they must know us by now. Anyway, we immediately headed to the tunnel and I took several images. We then went to the west end of the building where a lot of religious paintings reside, along with medieval type things. Not being impressed, we then went to Napoleon’s portrait and my husband was a willing onlooker. The Iranian artist Avish Khebrehzadeh’s exhibit Seven Silent Sings was also a great place for some options. Again my husband willingly stood in front of the animals passing by in the animated and mysterious exhibit. That looked really promising. Then we walked over to the Library of Congress. Why? I worked there for ten years and oftentimes have “nightmares” about having to go back to work - not just there, but at the health care places I worked for thirty years. In fact, I had a nightmare last night about this exact thing. So I used the panorama function on my iPhone, but followed a crooked line to create a messy building. That ended up being the submission this week. It looked interesting - and spooky - and met the challenge. One of these days the Napoleon portrait should be used for something - just not this time.