Inspiration: Lovely Words

I've recently been reading some John Green books (courtesy of Sam Roschewsk), and I'm always so touched by how beautifully he can phrase a sentence, as well as how funny he can be in the same paragraph. For instance, he expressed in The Fault in Our Stars "My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations." I loved, loved, loved this sentence. I found it to be absolutely beautiful and I always took inspiration in those kinds of sentences.

John Green has also expressed, "Chicken nuggets is like my family."

...

That's all okay, though, because he's hilarious and I think that being funny in a serious situation is actually fantastic. Here is the inspiration for my life himself:

He wrote this: 

In context, it's a much more beautiful sentence, but it has a series of inappropriate curse words before that, so I'm sadly only able to give you the end. However, John Green remains probably one of my favorite authors, and favorite people. 

Montage/Composite Inspiration

For my montage, I had a lot of inspiration to use something that directly affected me. For instance, I used drawings of buildings in cities I wished to go to, to show my love of travel. I also used milk and cookie earrings, which I'm still not quite sure of the meaning of, as well as a variety of photographs that included my idol, Audrey Hepburn, and words from a bracelet I scanned into the computer.

 I used Big Ben as one of the buildings/monuments in a city I'd love to visit! I've always wanted to live in England, specifically London. So to have Big Ben on my image was the most important part. It was my biggest wish. I also used this picture of Audrey Hepburn: 

Montage Tutorial

For my montage/composite, I used a few different tutorials to add the effects of some of my images. For a lot of my work, I needed to use a shadowing tool to make my images look more realistic with their surroundings. I didn't know how to do this myself, so I had use this tutorial video to show me how:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEv9enWUOWQ


Along with the use of shadowing effects, I was using the specific color to take pieces of uploaded pictures to my image. To do this I needed to use Color Range, but since there is a variety of different ways to use Color Range, and only one specific way in which I wanted to use it, I had to look up another tutorial to understand. To specifically take colors from an image and delete the others, I used this tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6yKEu25tEU

Inspiration: My puppy

Even though my dog, Lilly, is a stinky, old little thing whose tongue hangs out in a strange way, I love her. She isn't photogenic, she isn't even cute really, she's just awesome. She has had cancer for I think three years now, and was only supposed to live for 2 months! She's my miraculous little puppy, even if my friends make fun of the way she snores at night.

I love to take pictures of her. She may be ugly and a bit crusty with a perpetually angry looking face, but she is really the sweetest little thing you could ever see.

Poster

There are a lot of beautiful posters that people see on the streets, often lots of photoshop are put into them. Some may be intricately simple, yet others may be fantastically complex. Both types are endearing, and beautiful.

My own poster was, first, unliked and 'unreal'. So I made a second, and it was well liked and enjoyed which made things a lot better. A few posters that I really like are:

Street Art Candid Spots

For my photography project, genre based, I'm going to be using street art and candids. I used my fisheye camera to take the photos!

Some elements of candids are taking pictures 'in the moment' when no one knows their photo is being taken or otherwise are unaware of it. Something like this would be classified as candid portrait art:

I also think you can find candid art in street art, which is what I did. This can have landscapes, objects, and people in all the photos. What I wanted to do was capture the decisive moment even while in the fast paced city of Asheville, North Carolina. I thought these photos were kind of like what I wanted to take:

Inspired Part 2

This is the second part of my first blog, Inspired Part 1, and this time I'm going to share some photos I took around my house. Christmas time is one of my favorite times of year, so when my mom starts to get excited and decorate, suddenly my house is spotted with red and greens and angels. 

The plethora of these fake candles are in every room of the house, out of every window, and when you drive up the road to my house you can see them as you come. I absolutely love them even if they're a pain to turn on and off every night.

And then there's Lilly.... my mom decks her out in the football jersey and her own santa bed just for the holidays. It's adorable.

My mom's own homemade creation of a pinecone tree. I assisted in the picking of the pinecones (with a lot of complaining). Nonetheless it's still a gorgeous piece and fits well with the rest of the house.

A close up of my mom's hand glitter painted pinecones. I loved how the light shone off of these.

I hate his little creepy thing. It sits on that bench in the foyer until I put it in the basket next to it. It's creepy! You can barely see her face!