2012: through my iPhone--12 shots...and 'winners'

As 2012 comes to its end--

a sampling of things seen over the past twelve months 

through the lens of my iPhone and edited with snapseed...

Landscapes & seasons--

 Arizona, Washington, New Mexico, Georgia

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January:

--looking down into Sabino Canyon, from January 1st 2012 New Year's Day hike; 

'we are but dust and shadow'...
(panorama with AutoStitch app)

February:

--Spring came early to the Sonoran desert

after a rainy winter; 

by the end of February there were poppies already blooming...

March:

--an evening hike in Catalina State Park

April:

--prickly pear cactus blossoms

May:

--saguaros in bloom;

(this shot got printed in the Tucson paper)

June:

--the beginnings of the monsoon in the desert,

saguaro fruit ripening and evening rainbow...

July:

--back to the Pacific Northwest;

a summer hike up to Colchuck Lake, beneath Dragontail Peak and Aasgard Pass,

Central Cascades, WA

August:

--road-trip through New Mexico;

Enchanted Mesa near the Acoma Pueblo

(playing with COLORSPLASH)

September:

--rain pouring, like a cosmic bucket;

I had my iPhone with me on a morning run...

late summer monsoon over Tucson

October:

--faces in Tubac,

Mexican sculpture suspended from the ceiling,

Elvira's restaurant

November:

--first foray into the serendipitous surreal,

the simple act of symmetry revealing the unexpected face,

reflection in Sabino Canyon

(using PICFRAME for mirroring)

December:

--surreal along the Savannah River,

running on the GA/SC border;

cold at the water's edge...

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And, over the past year, three photos of mine have been winners
in a few of AFAR.COM's travel highlight contests, all iPhone shots:

http://www.afar.com/afar/catch-contest-week-1-winners

http://www.afar.com/afar/catch-contest-week-2-winners

http://www.afar.com/afar/catch-belgium-contest-week-2-winners

Landscapes and food--iPhone always at hand, eyes always seeing...

Slot Canyon landscapes, 'surrealized' with PicFrame

KaleidaCam is a great app for 'kaleidoscoping' photos, but for maximum control when playing with radial symmetry, PicFrame is more 'fine-tune-able.'

Thinking back to a couple of summers ago, when my wife and I spent some time in northern Arizona, I thought that some of the photos I took in Antelope Canyon--an already naturally surreal landscape--would be fun to manipulate into impossibly surreal landscapes using PicFrame...

First, a couple of examples showing the original landscape-shot and the radial-symmetry-'surrealization' side-by-side:

(These are all 'transplanted' snapseeded shots--

I took them with my Canon, but e-mailed the photos to 

my iPhone so I could edit them with snapseed and PicFrame--

so, not strictly 'iphoneography.')

The desert magic of erosion and symmetry:

For this last one--

the original, then with PicFrame, 

and then the cartoonish serendipity of the KaleidaCam app:

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with KaleidaCam app: saguaro blossoms and tea leaves

Recent experimentation with symmetry (see last couple of posts) led me to another iphone photo-editing app: KaleidaCam. 

I began playing with it while waiting for a plane, actually...and then sent the result to my wife, who said it took her a couple of minutes to realize what she was looking at:

Yeah. Circular-nose-ridge: creepy.

Front-camera self-portraits maybe aren't the best shots

for kaleidoscopic treatment.

So, on to something more pleasant--saguaro blooms.

Above, the original photo from this past spring,

and below--its permutations:

Still dealing with something organic, a bowl of tea-leaves:

Amazing that some people still look into such things for information about the future... 
(but anything random seems to take on meaning when radial symmetry is applied)

...and, what with the 2012 baqtun coming up on the winter solstice, 

I thought the scene looked vaguely Mayan:

And to end with--from a dinner at a Korean BBQ restaurant in L.A.--all of the banchan side-dishes, hands holding chopsticks, and grilling meat--the star of dinner:

10 permutations; revelations of backlit symmetry

Ten permutations of a single image, 

using the PicFrameApp along with Snapseed...

continuing to play with cropping and symmetry...

(scroll to the bottom to find out what you're looking at, 
or to confirm your guess)

Below,

the "source material," 

from a few weeks ago:

Above, the result of editing 

the 'original,' below,

an unfurling tulip in a vase on our coffee table,

backlit at sunset:

Tulip. Sunset. Surreal.