We had a front row seat for the Solar Eclipse this week.

Like after a touchdown at a football game, the crowd cheered. You could hear the applause and the hoots and hollers from across the vineyard. I added my voice with a full out scream. Woo HOOOOO! We were cheering the fact that, after an hour of watching the sun being slowly devoured, bite by bite, the moon had just silently slipped into place and completely blocked the sun. The clouds cleared out of the way, the stars came out, and the temperature cooled.
We were at a winery in South Carolina, staying overnight night in our Roadtrek camper van. We found the location by researching on Harvest Hosts a month or so earlier. The winery scheduled an event for the eclipse and they limited attendance to 300 people. We were the only RV there! We stayed two nights, before and after the eclipse. All to ourselves. Check out this aerial shot taken with Jim’s drone, the buses and all the people are gathering by the house at the right of the photo. Our motorhome is all alone at the far left.

Along with us posing with our eclipse glasses, It was a perfect photo op with the motorhome. First I added a bit of text to the photo using Snapseed on my phone.

But I’m not satisfied with just a photo, I want to turn it into artwork. To do that, I use a really fun app on my iPhone (also available on Android) called Prisma.

• App: Prisma
• Developer: Prisma Labs
• Cost: Free
• Platform: iOS, Android

Once you have Prisma installed, it’s a simple matter of opening the app, selecting a photo, then just tapping on one of the many filter styles. It works some artificial intelligence magic and turns your photo into artwork. You can then save anything you like to your camera roll. Each one of these versions were created with one tap on a filter type.

 

 

To see a demo of how it works, watch this segment of “What Does This Button Do” Episode 121 by Geeks on Tour.

Did you notice the collage at the beginning of this article? I made that using the collage tools in Picasa. I really like it, but I wanted to see what Prisma can do. Here are just a few of the variations it made. See this photo album for more.