Free Art for the Taking

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Sometimes I’m really ridiculously proud of something I’ve created. And that pride leads to me being a little obnoxious. Maybe a lot obnoxious, depending on how much you like me (or don’t). In this case, I took a photo of a flower out in the backyard, and within an hour it was up on my wall looking all professional and rad and stuff.

As soon as I was done with it, I shot off a message to my guy:

“I’m so excited, I printed out one of the sunflower photos I took, and it looks amazing in the frame and on The Wall! Woo hoo!”

I’m a fairly modest person, generally. Usually annoyingly self deprecating, and according to my friend Vix, the worst of all is when I acknowledge the obnoxiousness of my self deprecation and apologize profusely for it.

So claiming something I did is awesome and amazing and woo-hoo-able feels obnoxious to me, at least when I do it. It was even more obnoxious when “amazing” in the aforementioned email was all caps before I self-edited.

But (that uncomfortable feeling is coming over me) I do think this turned out amazing. AMAZING even.

AMAZING considering I looked outside and saw a few mostly-pitiful sunflowers finally blooming, and thought, that could be our first piece of art for The Wall! (The Wall is most definitely a future blog story. Hint: It’s in the living room, it’s behind the couch, and its developing awesomeness is extreme. [Crap! I'm doing it again!])

So here’s what I did, and how you can create your own free art just by taking a few photos, too.

Look outside and see something interesting. Or go outside and look closer at the uninteresting things – I bet you’ll find something interesting.

I saw a happy sunny sunflower. I’m attracted to the Happy Sunny, especially right now, and wish to collect, preserve, and display Happy Sunny whenever I can. I twisted my trusty 50mm f/1.8 lens onto my Canon Rebel (you can do amazing things with your point-and-shoot, too, so don’t let that stop you), slipped into the first pair of shoes I could find (high-heeled mules don’t look great with flannel pajama pants, fyi), and headed outside.

I really liked how the biggest sunflower had a couple of petals awry. So I shot a few frames head-on.

And then – and this is how you get the really interesting stuff – I took a walk around it (not easy in the dirt with heels, by the way). This is one of the most important photography lessons I’ve learned lately, thanks in part to the amazing photographer Penny De Los Santos, whose inspiring presentation at this year’s International Food Blogger’s Conference was the highlight of the weekend.

Walk around your subject – look at it from all angles.  Don’t just look – see every part.

Step behind it and see how the fuzziness of the back is highlighted when the sun’s hitting it just right.

See the perfect silhouette when you shoot just below it, and up into the sky.

And while you’re at it, look around you. Maybe the showiest subject, the first thing that caught your eye, isn’t necessarily the most beautiful. Maybe this dew-drenched bud is.

Or the shy little guy in the corner.

Or maybe the heart-shaped tramp stamp on Lizzie’s butt.Or not. It actually looks like Pac-Man from that angle.

I settled on this shot for The Wall.

I love the texture and pattern of the flower’s center.

If you have Photoshop, you can take your photo and emphasize it in various ways. Sometimes it’s fun to make things better or more interesting in Photoshop. Sometimes it’s better to preserve exactly what you created, straight out of the camera.

I used a couple of Photoshop actions from The Pioneer Woman (seriously, I love this woman). I ran the Seventies action and reduced the opacity slightly, then ran Define and Sharpen three times. Yup. Extreme. And then I adjusted the saturation, increasing the red.

I ended up with this.

Which is a tad overdone, but perfect – AMAZING even – when printed and tucked into a frame.

So there you have it. This kind of free art is the best of all, because you get to be obnoxiously proud of it, too.