A lot of my outdoor photographs are taken through car windows. This is partly a necessity and partly because discovering what I can create with the 3GS camera through glass fascinates me. Glass that's not always clean...
You may recall my awfully big adventure the other Saturday? My visit to the Liverpool Tate.
For once someone else was driving so I wasn't at the mercy of traffic lights and such and I snapped away through the car windows with gay abandon. My friend occasionally saying things like, "Why are you taking a photograph of a car park?" The Liverpool waterfront is an array of marvellous old buildings and hideously ugly new builds but there are two that I keep coming back to. I didn't capture any of the ventilation shaft this time but I did get some usable shots of the
Liver Building.
Here are the original, non apped images;
The birds looking out over the city and the Mersey, surrounded by these magnificent graceful buildings always lifts my spirits. (By the way there's nothing quite like taking the
Mersey Ferry across the river and just staying on it so that you can soak in the view on the journey back.) I realise that I'm biased but it is one of the most wonderful waterfronts in the world. Especially lit up at night...and it is after all, a
world heritage site.
Here, in vaguely the correct sequence of stages are my various apping explorations. From the first cropping and colour experiments to textural variations and some of the resulting images that I'm happy with.
As to the apps used...
Camera genius to shoot, crop suey to crop, then play with - camera+, Filterstorm, Photo Studio, Picture Show, Artista Oil, Auto Painter, HDR fix to blend, Strip Design for presentation and the eagle eyed may spot Weather Photo Effects...
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The earliest known use of a bird to represent the then-town of Liverpool was on its corporate seal, dating from the 1350s. The seal is now held by the British Museum.[1] In 1668 the Earl of Derby gave the town council a mace "engraved with ...a leaver", the first known reference to a liver bird by this name. In 1797 the College of Arms granted official arms to Liverpool, which depicts the bird in pride of place.
Since then the bird has been portrayed in many forms to represent the city. Two birds top the clock towers on the Royal Liver Building, at Liverpool's Pier Head, overlooking the River Mersey. The building, now headquarters to the Royal Liver Assurance, is probably the best-known in the city and was opened in 1911. Each tower is topped by a metal sculpture of a cormorant-like liver bird, designed by Carl Bernard Bartels and constructed by the Bromsgrove Guild.
There are two less well-known liver birds in the city. A third metal bird is on the nearby Mersey Chambers office building, adjacent to the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas, the parish church of the city of Liverpool. The fourth, a bird carved in stone, topped the original St John's Market building until its demolition in 1964. The stone liver bird is now displayed at the Merseyside Maritime Museum."
This site - LiverBirdology, has gathered together some splendid images of the various ways that the birds have been used and symbolised.
Here are two older images of a Liver bird and the tunnel ventilation shaft, taken over a year ago. Peeps with excellent memories will recognise them, one was in the OCCCA Pixels' show in San Francisco earlier in the year.
...which reminds me, if there's anyone still reading...I'm vaguely alert enough to be thinking about submissions again and saw via the wonderful Life in Lo-Fi about resevoir_dan's Mobile Photo Awards but I have no idea what to submit. Is there a kind soul out there who has a favourite image of mine from the past few months that could maybe help point me in the right direction?? I guess I could try and figure out how to do a votey thing...?
Thanks! :)
I am a disabled artist & designer based in Liverpool, a coastal city in the North West of England.