Fun With Photos

"Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation."   
Henri Cartier-Bresson

One of my hobbies is photography. I decided to print some of my photos to add tangling and make unique ZIAs (Zentangle inspired art). The first one I chose to do was a photo of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland, taken last August when I was visiting my daughter who moved there last year. Here is the photo I took (actually one of thousands).

You will notice that it was a nice sunny day and the sky was very blue. Well, that is not so commonplace over there, where it often seems to be gray and rainy. So I thought I would tangle the sun's rays on the picture and send it to my daughter so she could look at it and brighten her days when it was not so nice outside.

I used the Sakura Microperm pens on these photos, as the regular Microns would smear right off the glossy surface. What I learned after completing that photo is that the 01 pen worked great, smoothly gliding over the surface as I drew lines. But when it came to blackening in those little spaces in the middle (in the tangle Baton), neither the 01 nor the 05 worked so well. I had to touch the pen SO lightly to the paper to get the ink to fill in.

Fast forward a month or so to when I took out the next photo to tangle. The story behind this one was that I had gone out for a day of photography with a friend of mine. On our return trip trouble brewed. There was an accident on the bridge we had gone over, so the bridge was closed and we had to go all the way around and home a different way and over a different bridge. Traffic was just a disaster all over the place, and what should have been a half hour ride home turned into 2 1/2 hours! This VERY slow trip took us across the Ravenel Bridge which connects Charleston to Mt. Pleasant where I live. As we sat in traffic on the bridge, we were in a great position to take pictures of the top of the bridge, which is nearly impossible to get any other way. So, trying to look on the positive side, I pulled out my camera and snapped a few pictures right through the dirty car window. To my surprise I got a very good photo where you can't even tell it was taken through a dirty window. So, now that you know the whole story, here is my original photo.

When I tangled, it came out a little too dark to see when I scanned it, so I tweaked the color in Lightroom so the tangling is more obvious. Unfortunately, since some time had passed since tangling the Royal Mile, I forgot that filling in spaces was difficult, and I ran into the same problem on this one.

And then, just for fun, I decided I would make this one into a black and white image to see how it would look.

The last photo I tangled is my favorite one. I recently bought a new camera (a Panasonic Lumix FZ70 for those of you who care), and on the first day that I had it I went outside on my deck and took some pictures, just to get familiar with the camera. This is a photo of a dying magnolia flower on a shrub we have. I love the way it came out with the water drops. 

I (my husband) lightened the background a little in Photoshop before printing it, to make the tangles stand out better. This time I remembered not to use any tangles that had spaces that needed to be blackened. First I tangled the white border that was on the print I got from CVS, and then brought the pattern into the photo some more on one side. Wasn't sure exactly where to stop, but here it is.

This was fun - something a little different. If you're not into photography yourself but would like to give this a try, a fellow CZT, Sindy Levine, has published a book called "Real Life Strings", which is a book full of her own photos ready for your tangling pleasure. You can see the book here.