Weekly Photo Challenge: Orange

In terms of this week’s photo challenge, orange, I guess I just got lucky.  Today was the start of Art in Bloom at the St. Louis Art Museum. The challenge for local floral gurus in the area is to create a floral arrangement that represents a piece of art work they are assigned.  It is a fun and very crowded exhibit to see.  For this blog post I chose to show the floral arrangement of Catherine Thoele who was assigned Octagonal Jar with Design of Cherry Trees, Peonies, and Chrysanthemums.

ISO 400 8mm 0ev f/4.5 1/30

ISO 400 8mm 0ev f/4.5 1/80

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ISO 640 8mm 0ev f/4.5 1/40

Of the ones I saw, this was my favorite interpretive arrangement.  I loved the orange of the flowers, but one of the details that I appreciated was the leaves that had blue paint flecks on them, it was a nice tie-in to the original art work.

The challenges as a photographer to get these photos included low light, no flash allowed, and the crowds.  I chose to take my point and shoot, it is easier to handle in a crowded situation.  I used two different settings to get the photos.  One was Auto.  The other was a program mode that allows me to shoot macro.  I got some nice close-ups of individual photos in that mode.  As far as post-editing, I have kept that to a minimum. I did some cropping on a few.  The biggest adjustment I made was on the vase photo, where I applied an Iris blur filter.  I made that choice because the background was truly distracting.

I think it is because I enjoy looking at interpretations of art that this is one of my favorite exhibits of the year at the St. Louis Art Museum.  What do you think? should interpretations like this be featured in museums? Also, it was mentioned in the challenge to try a different gallery format for the photos.  I generally insert my photos one at a time in a fairly large format, so this gallery is a change for me.  What do you think of the format?  I think I can get away with it in this post, but I don’t think I be changing my normal format any time soon.  Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Interacting with Art

How do you interact with art? Does it inspire your own work?  I was at Laumeier Sculpture Park and this sculpture caught my eye. It is called “The Palm at the End of the Parking Lot” by Robert Lobe.  It is metal wrapped around a dead walnut tree branch.  It is a big sculpture and I wasn’t really interested in photographing the whole sculpture because it was the detail of the metal contrasted with the wood that caught my attention.  Also, as it just so happened, the sun was shining brightly, but in a way that I could take a shot and the sculpture would be very dramatic against the sky.  This is my final image:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/250

I will show you an original exposure later in this post but this version is three exposures bracketed together and edited in Photomatix Pro.  I chose the “Painterly” setting, because it was that combination of colors that I liked best.  Kind of funny that this ended up being a sculpture, photographed, and edited using a painting filter.

What do you think? Do you ever photograph art and then edit it? Is that an acceptable thing to do in your opinion, or is it unethical to modify another artists work in that way?  Feel free to leave your comments and thoughts below.

This post was also inspired by the weekly travel theme at Where’s My Backpack? The topic this week is sky.

Here is one of my original shots:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/250

Cheers!

A sketch for Design

This week in Design class we are working on the use of shapes and line in paintings.  Here is my sketch:

Sketch that has been scanned to a jpeg

Basically, what you are looking at is an interpretation of major shapes and lines in a painting.  Are you, by chance, able to identify the painting based on the sketch?  Let me know, leave a comment below, I’m curious to know what you think.

Here is the painting:

The Milkmaid or The Kitchen Maid by Vermeer dated to 1658-1661

Cheers!