When I first started to become passionate about photography as an art form — back around 2009 — I was struck by the work people were doing using textures to enhance their photographs.  I became a little obsessed with it, and took it to the limits of its appeal on many occasions.  (You can view some of the results of my experimentation with textures on my flickr page if you promise not to laugh.  Oh, the horror!)

But as I progressed, using Picnik as my photo editor (remember Picnik?), I came up with some results that I felt captured what I was trying to achieve in my mind’s eye.  Textures can create light, life, and depth in a photo, and can also give it an other-worldly, artistic, or vintage quality that appeals to me.

The process involves layering a texture with your photograph and then adjusting the layers to achieve the look you’re going for.  I used textures found on flickr created by Kim Klassen, Jerry Jones aka SkeletalMess, and Cheryl Tarrant, creator of the Distressed FX app.

I had my 15 minutes of fame on the texture train when I was the Photographer of the Week in the Boston Globe in 2010.  And then an interesting thing happened.  I was kind of over textures — I had reached my limit with the experimentation, and I wanted to move on to other things.

And now, of course, there are apps on our iPhones that make the process so much easier — in an instant we can use filters that will replicate the mood we’re striving for.  Snapseed, Mextures, Distressed FX, TinType, Plastic Bullet, and numerous other apps have texture choices to experiment with.

But I got a little nostalgic the other day for the old-school process of sitting down at my laptop and playing.  So I searched for free textures on flickr (remember flickr? — I miss those days!) and pulled up a few to play with.

The next step was to layer the selected texture with a photo.  I used PicMonkey’s texture layering tool.

Here are some of the results — showing the original photo first and the textured photo second.

I ended up playing for a few hours, and got lost in the editing process. I don’t know that I’ll ever be quite so passionate about using textures as I was in the past, but I’ll keep the process as one more tool in my photographer’s tool box.

Textures can be subtle or bold,  transformative or distracting, artful or artless.  It all comes down to making your vision a reality, and enjoying the journey along the way.

Have you played with textures?  Link to your images in the comments, or tag them on Instagram with #viewfindersio.

See you in April.

—lucy