Day Three (Wednesday 14th May): Experimental Photography And Image Handling For Bloggers. – 5KCBWDAY3

I’m aware that I need a better heading image for my blog, Twitter, etc. and so decided this would be the perfect time to do some experimenting for that. I’ve taken a few photos and am going to play around with them, documenting what I do.

First, I took one of my favourite cakes of yarn (to look at, to knit with is a different story…) and took a photo of it as I usually would. In case anyone is interested it’s Easyknits DW Toughie in ‘Who’. This is on a white background, with plenty of light and not much else. This is the raw image, no cropping, no brightness altering, nothing.

It’s perfectly good for documenting in my Ravelry stash, but it’s not very interesting. So then I remembered my fabric with cakes on it and thought that would be a good background, as it’s a cake of yarn.

The colours of the cakes are a bit vibrant for my liking and take away from the lovely colours of the yarn. Now is when I begin to play around with the image. I’m using The Gimp for this, as it’s free.

First, I tried taking all the colour out of the background. (I used this tutorial)

I like it, but I’m not sure about the fabric as a background. I took a close up of the yarn.

This shows the colours off really well. But how about using a stripe of colour? This time I also cropped it so that there is no background.

The colours stand out really well. This gave me an idea. The main reason of doing this was for a new blog header. What if I had a band of coloured yarn at the top and bottom, with the grey scale in the middle where the text goes?

I really like this look. I think the middle may be a bit too dark though. How would it look if I used really pale colour instead of grey?

I like that more. I think that’s what I’ll go with. The next problem is making the rest of my blog fit!

To see more posts on experimental photography, Google 5KCBWDAY3.