At the Post #2 (Malta)

I'm still at the post. I did spend about 2 1/2 hours by the post working through the exercises and even then I did not get finished.

I discovered, with a bit of help from Églantine, that my digital camera can take double exposures. Here is one of my first attempts.



So, it could be a post with a beard and long hair or maybe a person whose face has been out in the rain and sun too long.

I set the camera for a macro shot.



Finally, I took another macro shot and then played again with Photoshop using a coloured pencil filter.



(I do have some more tourist shots of Malta but it was an art trip so you will have to put up with a few of my artistic attempts.)

Digital Art Process

Following is a bit of the process in making a digital piece of art. OK, I'm just learning so it's not great art but I am pleased with my beginnings.

Step one: I found a post that had been used to tie up a large boat. The post was old, rusty and beautiful on its own in my opinion.



Step two: One of my art exercises was to move something in the environment to make a change in my original photo. I noticed, behind me in the city, a steeple on a church. It occured to me that it might be interesting to move the steeple onto the post. The problem was the steeple was far away, heavy, and much bigger than the post. Digital camera to the rescue! I took a telephoto shot of the steeple.



Step three: Back at the hotel room with my computer and using Photoshop, I moved the steeple onto the post after shrinking it a bit.



Step four: Again using Photoshop, I took some of the rust colours from the post and put them around the steeple so that it was not so obvious that I had done a cut and paste.



Step five: I added words of various colours and shapes; however, I did not like the result, so I took them off again. I am not sure that the digital photo is finished yet, but I have stopped for now.

If anyone has suggestions....

Boats and Flowers

Here is an attempt to keep Ontario observations and Malta memories both on the go. I don't know how long this will last.

Starting with boats, below are two photos of boats on the Grand Harbour of Valetta.



These boats were tied to the dock just below our hotel room for several days.



This was a large ferry that came into port several times during our stay in Valetta. Large transport trucks that drove onto and off this boat looked almost like toys in comparison to the boat itself. This photo was taken just as the sun came up in the morning while I was out for an early morning walk. The sunlight on the boat gave it a very interesting light.

And now for something completely different....



This flower is the pistillate (i.e. female) flower of a Beaked Hazel (Corylus cornuta). It is very small and not often observed due to its small size. I held it between two fingers to steady it and to give my camera something to focus upon.

Sunrise and Photo Art

Below is a photo of one of the first sunrises we saw from our hotel room.



The main object of our time in Malta was art. With that in mind, I shall show you two more sunrise photos. In both cases the sunrise is real and the grid is real but the sunrise was not taken through the grid or at the same time. The grids have been added to the sunrise photos to create a different image. In other words, the photos have been manipulated.





Any comments re the manipulations?

Malta and Art #1

It is believed that the oldest, free-standing, megalithic, stone "buildings" in the world are the temples on the islands of Gozo and Malta located in the Mediterranean Sea, south of Italy and Sicily, and just north of Libya. It was on Malta and Gozo that Églantine and I went to live, study, sketch, paint, write, and take photos for an "Art Stone Inquiry" led by an Ontario art group called the "Independent Art Inquiries" for the last ten days of March and first two days of April. From the study time we brought back over 5000 digital photos that act as daily photo diaries; art studies, tourist photos, and digital memories that will inform our art and lives in the near future. Although it will be impossible to share everything in this blog, Églantine and I will be able to post some of the highlights of our study and trip over the next few weeks as well as attend to the daily happenings of the emerging spring season back home in Ontario. Feel free to look, comment, make inquiries, and critique our photos and writings both here on the Ontario Wanderer Blog and on our Flickr sites which have links on the right side of this blog. Expect to see mostly OW writing and photos here and many, many more photos on Églantine's Flicker site as she took the majority of photos on the trip.

Following is a bit more background information, from a Malta guidebook, and the beginnings of some of the photos.

Malta is composed of three small islands with a total area of about 316 square kilometers. With an estimated population in mid-2005 of 398 534 people, there were 1261 people per square kilometer. (Compare that to just fewer than 31 people per square kilometer in the U.S. and just over 3 people per square kilometer in Canada.) The stone temples in Malta are around 1000 years older than England's Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids or somewhere in the range of 5000 to 5600 years old. The islands have been in the centre of political struggles for most of their history and have been controlled by others. Malta finally became independent in 1964.

Below are two photos of the location of our hotel room in Valetta, the capital city:





And from our hotel room, this is what we could see. I think we must have been the two luckiest tourists in Malta!