Interwoven in green

Back on the Grape Vine

I was recently judging some camera club entries and saw a number of colour vignettes, filtered to a low saturation or black & white at the edges. They were used well, to draw the centre of attention to the fully coloured zone. These work are the inspiration for my latest wallpaper.

I had taken a few photos of the grape vine on my back porch. I liked the lighting on this leaf especially BUT the edges of the image where very fussy. Not a good look for a screen wallpaper, because that's where most of us put the icons. So I experimented with the a couple of effects tools in picasa.  The first was the effects/soft focus, which softens the focus around a central zone. There is a slider to control the size of the circle (yes it is only a circle you can not make it elliptical). There is also a slider to control the rate at which the soft focus is brought in and you have a target to move the circle around the image with you mouse. This takes out the fussy edges nicely but oh such an intense green blur.

Next I tried out the Effect/Focal B&W which again give you a circular (not an ellipse) area of colour intact with the edge feathering out to Black & white. Sliders let you control the size if the circle and the sharpness of the colour spot. A target on the image to center the circle can be moved over the image using the mouse. Very Simple and intuitive to use.

Finally I decided to further edit my second attempt with the screen wallpaper maker in the Olympus Camedia software (which came bundled with my original digital camera) and which I still use occasionally along with that original camera. This software allows you to easily add a textured background overlay to part of the image (the left hand side where icon get put by default).

Of all my on-line photographic works, it is screen wallpapers on flickr, that get the highest views. Over whelming so, hundreds if not thousands of views each. I’m still not sure why, but I think they are fun to create, I use them on my own computers and why not share them?

The tenderils of the vine

  

I'm not sure if it is the lastest picasa update (version 2.6.0 Build 35.83.0) or a change to blogger log in, but the result is I can once again upload photos to blogger beta using the blog this button in picasa.