Cloud Mandala

Mary and I had just sat through several hours of a Florida State Poets Association executive board meeting on Sunday. Some time after 5 PM we headed back to the car, parked in the lot of a large mall. I hefted our box of papers in my arms and was ready to simply ease it into the trunk.

Instead I turned, took one look at the sky, and my eyes widened. I practically sprinted to the car, dropped the box on top of the trunk, whipped my camera out of my fanny pack, and took two quick shots as the first drops of rain began to fall....

When I uploaded the pictures I got this:

After color enhancement, most of the mandala is the left-hand shot copied and rotated, but that left me with a big blob of tree. Switching back and forth between Paint and Photo Editor, I isolated only the blob, then reversed the colors to make it white against a black background. I made the white transparent; placed the multiply-mirrored shape over part of the right-hand shot; knocked out the background; and put the new, cloud-filled form over its original counterpart.

Then I went to PowerPoint, where I drew a circle and filled it with the saved mandala image. I rotated the circle 90 degrees, placed it over the original image in Paint, and re-saved.

Thanks to Via Negativa, whose way cool list of web references includes one to the Online Etymology Dictionary, I found the intriguing word root of "cloud" and thought immediately of the rocks I'd photographed and used in my entry about object descriptions. I isolated the rocks in those pictures and set them into other cloud shots, using masking to tuck them in; then used Adobe Acrobat to capture and snip the quote. Then it was back to PowerPoint to add the title and save everything into a condensed .jpg file.

Carpe kludas.

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