Fun with textures

I've been neglecting my blog for the last week due to too much work, a lot of stress and too little time. Joubert participated in his school concert this past Friday night and I was asked to take pictures of all the children (72 of them!) in their costumes before the start of the concert. This alone was enough to send me straight to the Psychiatric ward, but I tried my best to keep my sanity about me as I still had to process all the images! I've also been working on my new site (which is not ready yet, therefor the absence of a link) which is taking up much more time than I would have anticipated.
So for these and several other reasons, my faithful camera has been resting snugly in its bag, patiently waiting for the next assignment. In the meantime, I have started to experiment with the use of textures in some of my images and after the initial learning curve, I'm really starting to enjoy it. The trick is to use the right texture with the right image and then to get the opacity and blending just right. I've discovered that I like the children' portraits more if the textures do not cover the faces and since I've figured out how to keep the faces "clean", I really like the effect much more.

In the first image the texture is very subtle, but I like the way it makes the face stand out more.


In this one the texture is very distinguishable and I'm inclined to lower the opacity slightly, but I tried for a different effect.

My husband is the one who got me interested in textures as he is a huge fan of this technique. All the textures that I currently use, was photographed by him with his Sony Cybershot. He really has an eye for a good texture and so even though I can be very hard-headed when he tries to give his opinion I have to say thank you to Henk, for giving me some good tips!