356 - Balinese Doors

Day 356. One of the lovely aspects of wandering around Bali is seeing all the beautiful doors that lead off the main streets: some highly ornate and others very simple. Some lead to family home complexes, some to temple areas, and others, who knows? But they look delightful and are a real part of the cultural landscape there. These are six doors that caught my eye, shot with my Nikon D7000, tweaked and treated in Adobe Lightroom and arranged with Diptic for Mac.

345 - Florality

Day 345. Linda and I are enjoying a relaxing break in Bali. It's a beautiful island, and the Balinese are beautiful people. The hotel in Kuta puts these floral arrangements in circular pots, and I used Diptic to create these four circular designs of the flowers. These images were just taken on my phone looking directly down at the flowers. The last one was actually taken in Ubud.

342 - Roots and All

Day 342. I photographed these lovely old tree roots on the trees in the grounds of Jakarta Intercultural School, and applied a few filters in the Android camera app, then used Diptic to arrange this three panel triptych.

330 - Cactii

Day 330. While shopping at Flower Power this morning I took these shots of various little cactii, cleaned then up a little in SnapSeed, and assembled them in a Diptic to accentuate their circularity and their prickliness.

326 - Night at the Museum

Day 326. Riding the train home late at night from Museum Station, I took these photos of the word museum on the back of the seat then arranged it like this with Diptic. Pushed the contrast up, pulled the saturation down and adjusted the brightness. I like the overall graphic quality of the finished image.

325 - Ride the Network

Day 325. Again with the grid of images, I really do like the effect of using Diptic to assemble parts of a larger image into a fragmented composition. These images are part of the Sydney rail network, flipped, mirrored, aged, effected, filtered.

270 - Eastern Suburbs

Day 270. I found these satellite images on Google Earth. These are aerial shots of some of Sydney's most well known beaches... Bondi, Bronte, Maroubra and Tamarama. Dropped into Diptic and arranged for today's daily create.

200 - On Track

Day 200. I'm now 200 days into this project, and it's been fascinating to keep coming up with something creative each day. I've gotten a little behind with my posts lately, but this one gets me back on track again, with this 200th post being created on the 200th day.

So to mark both the 200th post and getting back on track again, I made this collage of Number 200 bus routes. Turns out there is a Route 200 bus in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, and these maps show them. Placed next to each other like this, I think they look quite good together, but then I am definitely a self confessed map nerd, so anything with a map in it looks good to me.

188 - Southbank Triptych

Day 188. After spending a full day working in Brisbane I went for an evening stroll across the river and took a couple of shots down on Southbank which I then arranged into this little triptych using Diptic. It was a little chilly with not many people around, and it's a very different place when it's quiet like this.

183 - Closeups

Day 183. I was playing with a macro lens in my Nikon D7000 and just snapping some closeups of plants in the back yard. I took a couple and arranged them using the Diptic app, and here they are.

 

158 - Late Bloomers

Day 158. Despite the fact that we are already in Winter here in Australia, the excessively stunning weather we have been having lately seems to have confused the plants a little. These photos, taken on my Nexus 5 phone using the new blur mode in the camera and then processed using the camera's built in editing tools, are from the small eucalyptus tree in our back yard. The blur mode give a lovely shallow depth of field effect to the shots. They were then arranged into these four panels using the Diptic app for Android.

 

154 - Another Spoonful

Day 154. I'm in the Brisbane Convention Centre today for a conference and there is a beautiful piece of art hanging on the wall that I really like. It's a series of torn corrugated squares, arranged in a grid, made by an artist named Rodney Spooner. In the spirit of remixing, or appropriation, or making art based on other art, today's daily create is a series of close up photos of Spooner's art piece, arranged back into a grid using Diptic.

119 - Stripey Selfie

Day 119. I was showing my Year 3 kids how to use Gmail and they wanted to know how to add a profile photo. So I showed them by taking a selfie. To make it a bit more interesting I dropped it into a grid on Diptic and shattered it around a bit.

 

114 - Shaving Mirror

Day 114. While staying in the hotel in Christchurch I noticed the bathroom had one of those old style round magnifying shaving mirrors on the extendable arm. (I've only ever seen them in hotels...). It inspired me to take a few "stubble selfies" in the mirror, which I then assembled into this image using Diptic.

108 - Life is Random

Day 108. While playing around with Diptic tonight I discovered it has a mode that will fill the frames with images selected at random from the iPad camera roll. So here, with zero intervention or aesthetic consideration from me, is six images selected at random by the machine.

1. Sunset on Cronulla Beach, doing steel wool photography.

2. Camping in the Hunter Valley with the Suzuki 4WD Club

3. Sir Ken Robinson and I at ISTE in San Diego.

4. RAAF banner from the ANZAC Day march in Sydney.

5. A Zorb ball at the PLC Sydney Open Day last year.

6. My mum and I at home.

 

091 - A Few Good Men

Day 91. One of our English teachers at school asked if I knew of an easy way to visualise characters. Her students were reading a novel and she wanted them to create drawings of how the characters looked in their heads.

My first thought was to use a police identikit to construct the faces. A quick search turned up FlashFace at http://flashface.ctapt.de/. It also has an app for both iOS and Android. The web version is pretty good and does quite a lot, but the free version on Android is a bit limited, and only does male faces.

Still, it's worth a look and it made the English teacher very happy.

073 - Playground Textures

Day 73. It's easy to overlook the interesting things in our daily environment. For today's daily create I wandered around our school playground and took 9 photographs with my iPad mini looking directly at the playground from above. While taking these perpendicular shots I was looking for interesting textures and shapes and patterns. I then arranged them into this 3x3 grid using Diptic to create this final result.

There is something about grid layouts that really appeal to me, even going right back to my days at art school in the 80s. I often found myself coming up with visual ideas that were based on grid layouts. Not sure why, I just like them.
I want to offer a hat tip to Ross Wallis for this idea. Ross is a fellow Adobe Education Leader from the UK. He mentioned this idea to me several years ago at an Adobe Summer Institute in San Jose and he was originally making these photo grid designs using InDesign.

071 - Playing with Virtual Clay

Day 71. The Pottery HD app allows you to make virtual pottery on a virtual pottery wheel. It's obviously not the real thing, but it's a bit of fun to play. It even teaches some interesting things about different types of clay, throwing techniques, and even helps you learn about some art history with the use of different patterns and pot types that were used in different cultures.

068 - More Colliding Scopes

Day 68. I've just come back from a 2 hour night photo shoot, so I would have liked to post some of those shots as my daily create but they are still on the "big camera" and I can't transfer them at the moment. So today's create will be another kaleidoscope image, created with yet another kaleidoscope app, this one us called Kaleidoscope. Surprise! It works much like the others, but has a few cool features. I like the neon effects of the lines.

I arranged three instances of the final kaleidoscope I made in a three panel Diptic frame, then applied filters from within Diptic to make then a little different to each other. I'm trying to use the basic artistic principle of unity versus diversity. The same but different. Repetition without regularity.

059 - Little Creatures 2

Day 59. Some of these creative tools require time and experimentation to figure out what you can do with them. I made a 3D model a few weeks ago using a very cool iPad app called 123D Creature from AutoDesk. It's amazing software, and really shows just how powerful the graphics hardware is on the latest iPads. I wanted to push this idea a bit further, so this creature is a little more sophisticated than the last one, with a more complex skeleton and more detailed modelling, lighting and rendering.

Once I made the model I snapped shots of it in different positions (just to show that it really is made in 3D!) I then dropped those images into Diptic and arranged them into this grid design. One thing this daily create project is really forcing me to do is "app smashing", where content is passed from app to app to come up with interesting things that the combination of those apps can offer.