Shadowmeld Photography

Tree bark, mulch chips, and various wood grain surface images are helpful to add natural Earth elements to designs and artwork. While bark is effective at creating a rustic look, exposed grain may emphasize craftsmanship, hand-made quality, and a finely polished finish. There a many options available for a grained surface look or Earth tone texture, since wood is frequently used in construction and crafting throughout the world.

Often leveraged for grunge and industrial appeal, metal textures are a great way to add a rough or polished look to text, designs, object skins, and backgrounds. Incidentally, since metals are commonly used in manufacturing and production, options for photographing metallic surfaces are very much abundant throughout the modern world.

Smooth or rough, glass surfaces have a knack of adding reflective, glossy, or ripple effects to images in the design process. Varying light across the surface can increase depth, create natural light gradients, for creative textures, and be used to emphasize specific elements in a composition.

A closer look at fabrics and textiles reveals patterns from the production process and interesting textures for image compositions, artwork, and design projects. Fabric textures are a great method to add subtle elements which breakup solid color blocks, hue monotony or vary tone perception in creative ways.

Photography with minimal color, or monochromatic, instantly changes emotion about the subject to dramatic effect. Where color may distract an observer from particular details in a scene, the absence of manages to coerce the eye into viewing contrast and the significant understanding of light and shadow play in the composition of an image. A natural reaction to black and white photography may be a feeling of sadness for minds with color expectations, or perhaps content feelings for minds which understand a monochrome world.

Adjusting color balance and levels for interesting artistic effects can be achieved with little manipulation to a photo's subject to emphasize mood and feeling, principals behind expressionism to distort perception. The method behind this set is to create a different way of looking at photographs by dialing back saturation and then methodically adding color back only through channels which emphasize certain feeling in the scene. It's easy to spend hours on end, removing and adding color, to discover a fitting mood for each photograph.

Multiple abstract views of wafer-thin, colorful discs bisecting and fading into each other to form simple and complex patterns that compose a small portion of a larger scene. Slow-racking focus, by remote triggering the shutter while slowly turning the manual focus ring, with varying exposure and distances helped create soft color blends on the dark background while obscuring sources of light.

Buffalo are almost synonymous with Yellowstone National Park in the United States, as the animal often associated first to the park due to abundance. Over four thousand American bison, split into two large herds, are a common sight throughout the area as the buffalo depend on Yellowstone's vast grasslands for survival. With the sheer number of bison around park roads, there are loads of opportunities for observation and candid photographs from a safe distance without interfering with natural behavior.

Running along fall leaves on the forest floor, an American Grass Spider attempts to find cover after being startled by a group of hikers. Though harmless to people, this fast-moving spider may catch someone off-guard if it scurries in front of them unexpectedly. Grass Spiders use speed to nab insects like grasshoppers that make contact with a funnel web without relying on silk to hold prey in place for consumption. Identifying exactly what kind of brown Grass Spider this is can be tricky, with a number of variations in the family, but the black dorsal lines and abdomen spots help narrow it down.

Spinning a web at the side of a house, a female Black and Yellow Garden Spider prepares to trap its next meal. For many gardens across the United States, the presence of this spider helps indicate vegetation is in good health, as the spider captures and devours pests that may gnaw on heirlooms or cause irreversible damage to leaves and stalks. While it may look scary, the Yellow Garden Spider is mostly harmless to adults and very rarely preys on anything larger than itself, with preference to small insects.