Tuesday, July 19, 2011

iPhone Wallpaper


When my iPhone Classic fell out of my shirt pocket and into the water at the lake shore last week, I shared a few choice words with the local turtles and with my walking companion, Lola the Poodle.  The speaker and microphone were ruined, making the phone obscenely expensive to repair, so I bought a new one for a quarter of the repair cost.

I have minimal needs of my phone and didn't need all the razzmatazz of the iPhone 4, so I bought the 3Gs, which sounds like some kind of sports car.  The new iPhone software comes with new wallpaper choices and none of the old that I liked so well.  Thus, I searched the web for wallpaper options and found so many that I decided to jump in and make some of my own.

The water lily with cloud reflection and water ripples is my current favorite.  The Missouri Botanical Garden offered many photo inspirations last week, so here are a few more.


This is an inverted reflection of a window in a lily pool.  I turned it upside down to enhance the strangeness.


This is Rudbeckia "Indian Summer," I think.  I thought it would be much too busy for a background, but it has a certain charm when used as phone wallpaper.

It's really hard to make a landscape picture work as wallpaper.  Lake water helps, because you can place the water under the bottom row of icons so that the focal point is not obscured by them.


This closeup of foliage on a Smoke Tree becomes little more than interesting texture behind the icons. I think it, too, works.


Several of these landscapes are keepers because the photo without the icons is so beautiful.  Can't let go of them.


Here I've placed grass at the bottom where the main icons rest, with lots of "reflection water" to occupy most of the screen and a beautiful bridge at the top.


I did a version of that one with no grass, more water, and a larger bridge.


This shot of a concrete shrine is more about the textures of trees.


Finally, this shot with two lily blossoms probably could have been made more effective if I had zoomed out when I framed the picture.  I didn't take alternate shots of this subject, so I'm left with an also-ran.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lovely photos, Michael. Thanks for sharing your photographic eye. You make the special requirements of 'wallpaper' photos quite clear!

I have yet to buy a cell phone that has enough of a screen to play with 'wallpaper'--and there's no pond in my back yard to lose my old cell phone in. Besides that, I leave my cell phone turned off, in my purse, to be used only in automotive emergencies...

Stay cool! Seajay