The cornflower picture

 Some of you might have noticed that I've made a few small changes to the blog. I've added new pages for my free tutorials, recipes and jigsaw puzzles, making them much easier to find. I've also tried to add a personalized favicon. For some reason it worked on my other blog, but as far as I can see not on this one. (If you can see a favicon other than the Blogger B, I'd love to know about it.)

I've used the same image for the favicon as for my Blogger profile. I don't think I've said anything about the background of that image, though, despite mentioning that I would when I made the change. So here it is, the story behind the cornflower photo -- and the "original" photo I created the image from:

It all began a summer afternoon when I wanted to take some photos of my sister's multi-coloured cornflowers. It was a lovely light outside so it felt like the right moment to get some pics. I'd just recently taken a few photos indoors and it wasn't until after the first photo I realised I hadn't changed the white balance settings. That's why the colours are a bit strange. It's not edited afterwards. It's the result of me forgetting to reset the camera. I love the effect!

So that explains the colours, but not the cropping. Because I did of cause not miss half the flower when I took the pics. The inspiration for the artsy cropping came from the editing software I was using at the time, Picasa. When you want to crop an image in Picasa, the software gives you several suggested cuts if you don't want to choose yourself. One way the software wanted to crop my photo intrigued me so I used it. That's the photo you see just above this paragraph.

I had struggled with a picture of a flower and background in colours I loved, but with a composition that was just so plain. This way I could focus on the things I liked about the photo. I just had to learn that you don't have to fit the whole object in the image. It can look nice this way too. But I'm not sure I would've seen this solution without the suggestions created by the software. That's the one feature I miss about not using Picasa anymore.

Later, I wanted to add a new image to my Blogger profile. No matter how much I loved my dragon, I felt another image might say more about me and my style than the black and blue sweetie. For my profile image, I needed a square pic so I just cropped the top half of the original image and changed the resolution. As a bad last move, I also added a texture. So reduntant with a photo like this one, but it's the way it is now.

Someday I'll make that pic into a pendant (if the resolution isn't too bad for printing). I think it'd make a nice focal in a necklace.


By the way... 
Speaking of blog changes, I'm thinking about making a new banner for my other blog. Mainly because I want something more bead or jewellery related. I'm not a fan of fairies and choose the image I'm using now more because of the colours. And I want something more personal, by mer for my work, than some free clipart I found online years ago. If you have any suggestions -- or want to save my fairy -- I'd love to hear it.