The Golden Gate – in Texture

Here’s another of my experiments in adding textures to an image. This image is a texturized version of this original shot below taken on January 1, 2010 at Baker Beach in San Francisco using my tiny Canon PowerShot S90.

I also tweaked the image a bit to make the bridge towers more vertical – and then applied the Purple Prose texture from French Kiss Textures. This particular texture has script elements on the left side of the image – and I thought those elements worked well into the sky and mountain area on the left side of the bridge itself.

I love how the texture adds dimension to the image – making it much more interesting to my eye as I want to explore it for longer than just the original image. For me, that’s the power of adding textures – making the image much more interesting and something you want to spend time exploring – similar to how a great painting captures your eye and mind.

For more examples of my texture experiments, see this image of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, this image of the FV Point Reyes aground at Inverness, and these early experiments in blue and gold texturized images of San Francisco taken from Fort Point.

         

If you’re interested in textures, here are some resources I’ve found very helpful:

• I first became interested in textures after beginning to follow Trey Ratcliff’s HDR photography work. His Ultimate texture tutorial (aff. link) was a great learning experience for me.
• Since then I’ve enjoyed the work that Leslie Nicole does with her French Kiss Textures. In particular take a look at her French Kiss Textures Flickr group and her Facebook page – both highly recommended resources.
• Another great artist is fine art photographer Doug Landreth – he did a creativeLIVE workshop a while back that was amazing.

Are there others? Yourself? Tell me about them in the comments below!