Photos for texts and textures -- or Why I save crummy photos and takes pics of boring things

If you've read some of my older posts, especially reading my named tag digital art, you might know that I enjoy to take photos to use as backgrounds or textures. Like the ones in the collage above.

I love old -- and broken -- greenhouse glass as it's perfect for creating moody photos (as is fog and water). Sure, sometimes they're dirty and if the focus has accidentally been on the grit on the glass rather than the glass or a object in front of or behind the glass (as in the post Caught behind glass), it can result in ugly pics. But most of the time you get fun pics ready to be used in what ever creative way you can think of.

I actually started writing a text about this back in september, but never finished it. The post was to be called Why I save crummy photos -- and take pics of boring things. This is what I was going to say about it back then:

I think at least some of you know the answer to why I do those things: textures. Previously on this blog, I've shown some pics made using both textures made by others and textures made by me. So far I've rarely made any fancy textures, but rather used special photos as textures. And it's turned out to be both fun and creative to find photos to use and think about what to photograph for new textures.

Here's one example of that. I'm going to show you the result, the original photo and the texture photo just to show what the two components look like and how easy it is to make textures of your own. [yeah, I'm not going to do that today. If you want I can show you an example some other time. Just let me know.]

There are some really fab textures available online. Many are free, other can be bought. I love them. But sometimes it feels more rewarding to use your own. It's your picture from start to finish, your creation -- from scratch -- to take credit for. And using your own textures, there's no copyright issues either to worry about.

Anyway, I wasn't going to write about it at all today. I just wanted some way of introducing two of my latest results of my "digital doodling". Two different approaches to the same photo that I intend to use as a background for text. Here, I just pulled out two quotes I found on my Words and quotes Pinterest board.

First a version with a black edges. As I like dark edges, makes it more moody and old-looking. There's also a slight texture (from a photo of the same greenhouse glass) layered on top of it.

Then I thought, "why not try something new and add a white mist to the edges instead of the usual black?" A bit washed out. If nothing else, why not do it to match the snow on the leaves? And that's how I ended up with this. Also with the same texture as above.

Wonder what the original photo looked like? I inserted it below. It's just resized, not edited in any other way.

It's a lot of fun taking these photos. Not sure how much longer I will have this great place to go for moody textures and backgrounds: dad has said he wants to tear down the old greenhouse as there's almost not one whole window pane left and the door rotted last summer. The smaller greenhouse isn't as good as this one, especially since the glass doesn't go as far down as it does in this one and there's less room to take photos. Well, it's not coming down anyway soon, I think, so there's still some time to take photos.