Infinite Universe: December 7th, 2009 - Great Colorful Blobs Of Smeary, Shaky, Morphy Stuff

Getting down to the end of the Candlewasting (so to speak) move and am throwing in a recent couple bonus pics.
I took this the other night on a dog walk down to the lagoon with Happy. Not much going on down there for plants except a few prairie plants desperately clinging to their seeds, such as this Canada Rye.
I can't decide if I like it better in white or black:

It was taken with the "little camera" (Olympus 850) with flash, and the background was pretty much black. It's fun to play with stuff like this in Paint Shop, just change it to grayscale, decrease the number of colors, and apply the 'art pencil' filter.
It reminds me of woodblock prints.

Here are a couple with some massive post-processing. The size here doesn't do them much justice, in 'reality' they are huge files and have a lot of detail within the lines.
Strangely enough, or maybe not when you think about it, this picture was actually hatched from this original:

In just cranking through a ton of effects I morphed it into the teardrop. I don't like to delete things judging off of the back of the camera, because I might want to do something like this later. I also save plain, weird patterns and mistakes and drop them into a folder in my 'Experimental' file called "backgrounds."

I'm sure the purists don't agree with this much post-processing, but tough nugies to them. It's fun and it teaches you a lot about your editing program in a hurry.

A similar bastardization has turned it into the 'vibrating amorphous blob.'

Eh, sometimes you have to do things for the sake of science if nothing else.

One of my favorite things to do when I can't think of anything else to shoot or I know I'm not going to be getting any realism (like with the cheap camera in the car on a dark night). Is to shoot 'smears.'

These smears are from a series taken driving down Ford Parkway when they have the Christmas lights up (which is about nine months out of the year). The tight thin waves are tree lights on the boulevard, the bright white streak is a streetlight, and the greens and reds are actually the dashboard lights of the car. You can see the basic form of the rearview mirror in the middle of the thin waves, showing it's own light reflections.

Anyone can do this, just set your camera to a slow shutter speed and point it out the window or windshield of a moving car at night.

Some consider it gauche, but I like it. It's more like painting when you can't see the canvas.

The stickman thumbs a ride by the side of the road.

Sometimes through smearing you can get otherworldly colors that haven't been invented yet. Not even to paint Volkswagens with.

It's interesting to hold the camera at different angles to the motion of the vehicle. Holding it diagonal to the windshield when moving forward has gotten some interesting results. It's sort of a 'vector' thing.