Still life created using Snapseed and Mextures

This textured painterly floral iPhoneography image has raised the question,“Is it a painting or is it a photograph?” For this style of edit – which is my preferred style for still life images – this is the ultimate accolade. For those who don’t know my work, it is precisely this question I would like them to be thinking about.

Last Summer we bought some pet rabbits, Ginger and Fidget. We have a small courtyard style back yard which is completely enclosed. As escape seemed unlikely, since last summer, they have been allowed to run free with a hutch in the corner for shelter. Needless to say they were great in Autumn clearing out the yard but this Spring they ate all the plants before they had a chance to establish. This single Allium is all that survived of our Spring bulbs. Our garden has now been replanted and the rabbits given a nice large contained play area.

Apps used: ProCamera for initial capture, then for processing:Camera+, Filterstorm, Mextures, ProCamera, PS Express, Snapseed, Superimpose

The original image shot in ProCamera

STEP 1

Filterstorm ~ always crop and resize at the earliest opportunity. This crop was just to switch to a 1:1 ratio and I resized to 2,000px x 2,000px to give a good resolution size for printing (this is a slight size increase on an iPhone4 capture. iPhone5 would be bigger than this at capture anyway):

STEP 2
Snapseed ~ Drama filter under the bright 2 preset.

STEP 3
Snapseed ~ Grunge filter applied randomly and then manually adjusted when something approaching what I am looking for emerges.

STEP 4
Mextures ~ A combination of 4 texture layers added and saved as a favourite as the basis for future iPhoneography edits.

PS Express ~ This is the original cropped image with exposure boosted x1.

Superimpose ~ The image above blended with image three on multiply at 50 percent opacity:

Camera+ ~ The preferred camera replacement app for many people but I tend to use ProCamera at the moment. However, I still enjoy Camera+ filters and enhancement capabilities. The final image was run through Camera+ fluorescent filter:

Allium by Skip

Paul Brown (known as Skip), is an exhibited and prize winning iPhoneographer from Lincoln, England. He is a member of the global AMPt Community, a founding artist at New Era Museum and a featured blogger for iPhone Life Magazine. Skip was a finalist in the Photobox Motographer of The Year 2012 with my image “Skipping” and runs his own blog where he shares his techniques at http://skipology.com