Guest Blogger Gaston Graf

Please welcome guest blogger, Gaston Graf, who in a very short time has became a "Hipstaddict". His work stood out to me because of the post processing he was doing to his Hipsta images. I am finding that more and more people who take photos with their iPhones are becoming interested in learning more about the artist possibilities. 

My name is Gaston Graf. I live in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg in Europe. Married to my German wife Fanny and a dad of two daughters, 18 and 11 years old. I'm a professional locomotive engineer (some just call it a train driver), working for the National Railroad Company SNCFL. Altough I bought my first camera in 1983, a handy little Minox 35PE I got really hooked to photography after I bought m first SLR in 1992, shortly before our first daughter was to be born, our child then being my main subject for photos. It's a Canon EOS100 that I still use today. The digital photography changed a lot for me because there had been no costs anymore to get the film rolls developed and picture editing opened a whole new and exiting world to me. I love my Canon EOS40Dslr but since I discovered the incredibly great App "Hipstamatic" I became a true Hipstaddicted. I soon realized what great creativity the Hipstamatic offers. The term "iPhoneArt" came to my mind and I was amazed to discover that the community of iPhoneographs is growing more and more. Thanks to people like Teri Lou Dantzler and Cara Gallardo I discovered a bunch of very good apps that I now use to create my own iPhone Art. This my first "oil picture" that I made with the iPhone and various apps. It's a Daffodil currently in bloom at our terrace.

Hipstamatic

Lens: Chunky

Film: Alfred Infrared

Additional Apps used: 

ArtistaHaiku - for the ink. Style: Abstract #5, Paper: the last one on the grid, Settings: all sliders to the full right except but for the ink outline slider set at about 75%.

Paint it! Now - for the first oil. This was just a test to see how the ink picture would look like if overpainted with oil. The result didn't satisfy me completely but I kept it nevertheless.

Iris Photo Suite - to blend the ink layer with the oil layer as well as to adjust the size of the ink layer which was limited to 1000x1000 by Paint it! Now. Method used: Overlay. 

ArtistaOil - for the second oil, Paint Style: Oil Landscape #2, Canvas #5, Texture 0%. I set the texture at 0% because I wanted to apply the burlap texture provided by Pic Grunger.

Pic Grunger - to add the burlap texture. Effect settings at 0%, Canvas at 100%, Style: Block Party, Only with the Block Party style there is no color influence on the rest of the picture, especially the white border.

Filter Storm - to enhance colors and to add two frames, one thin black frame and one larger white frame.

To add my own handwritten signature I used Adobe PhotoShop CS5 because I think it looks better than an ordinary watermark made with Impression.

If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger please contact me at teri@terilou.com