Remembering Spring

Perspective

Tweak the Antique

I'm fairly new to Adobe Lightroom (my new BFF photo editing program) so I’m still working out my system. The whole post processing thins can be overwhelming to say the least, especially when you take as many photos as I do. I’m thinking that we’re all in that same boat of shooting gazillions of photos so I know you can relate.

One of my favorite presets right now that Lightroom offers is aged photo. t first when I click on it my images looks totally overexposed but when I take down the exposure slide (is that what they call that thing?) it starts to work it’s magic. The photos look nostalgic in an interesting, not sappy way. I will admit that I thought I was so over that antique tinted look but with the options this baby gives you, you can totally revamp the look of it.

In the shot above I got it too look just as I liked it just by playing with the exposure slide (I hope that's what they call it). The only thing that was missing was more color in the magenta flower so I cranked it up a little. I used the magenta slide and upped the saturation and my work was done. I love the way the warm pinkish cast works in this image and the flower is just tinted enough to remain a subtle but beautiful focal point. That against the color of the little girl’s skin captivates me.

Have you used aged photo or something like it? Do you use it as it comes or do you tweak your antique?

Mastering the art of the rinky-tink-tink: part two

I can’t claim any state of zen with my point-and-shoot camera. Most days, it takes near-herculean restraint to not chuck it off the end of the nearest wharf.

Taught my three-year-old several new curse words this weekend trying to capture him indoors — the NERVE! — where my press-down-halfway-and-hope-for-the-best pipsqueak stubbornly refuses to focus.

But a less-than-SLR camera need not be a creative crutch. Right? Right.

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I'd like to think that creativity is more than 'have’ or ‘have-not’. To accept the "you've got it, and you don't" myth would be utterly demoralizing on those days when I'm feeling photographically tapped — those days, I'd rather take a deep breath and say to myself It's not just me being inherently dull, or hopelessly all-thumbs with a camera. I'm just forgetting something, getting lazy.

Here's what helps me get my groove back — before pressing the shutter, an ABC of creative checkpoints:

ANGLE. Take risks. Lie on your belly. Crouch. Get up on a chair. Try a few without looking through the viewfinder, if an inventive angle requires it. Before turning away from a scene or subject, take at least two or three more unconventional angles or stances. When I start to get bored, chances are good it's because I've spent too much time with the camera at eye-level.

BACKGROUND. Do a visual inventory of everything around your subject — passerby, traffic, signage, household clutter — and change your stance to minimize visual distractions. Do whatever it takes for a clean frame, because there's some law of photography physics that assures the expression of a lifetime will occur in the one frame of a hundred that includes the potbellied guy standing stage left with the MASTER BAIT & TACKLE t-shirt.

COMPOSITION. At the last moment, look through the lens abstractly to consider the shapes, lines and balance formed by your subject and surroundings. Reduce what you see to blocks of colour and pattern, and respond to that stripped-down vision from the gut. This always leads me towards what often feels counter-intuitive, or quirkier than rule-of-thirds. While it may not always work, it's always worth a try to tilt, shift and crop for more mindful composition — as opposed to everything is inside the frame and no one’s got a finger up the nose: check.

If you’re an enthusiastic enough photographer to be here, you know all this already. But it’s forgetting these basics that gets me stuck in snapshotty ruts — and blaming those ruts on my wharf-bound pipsqueak.

Which, in the absence of something better, doesn’t do any favours for me or the Kodak.

Hope

As we wind down an old year and get ready to bring in the new, one of the most overwhelming feelings I experience is hope.  A new year brings so much potentiality -- so many opportunities to make the coming year better than the previous.

It's a clean slate.  A whole new world.

I'm one of those people who believes that writing down your hopes, your expectations, your aspirations is one of the first steps to manifesting them.  So, I'd like to go on record:

I hope this coming year represents a quantum leap in my, my husband's and my daughter's discovering our true bliss, whatever that may be for each of us.  I hope we all -- me, you, everyone -- come a bit closer to respecting each other, and even more importantly, celebrating each other, for all our fabulous differences. 

What do you hope for in the coming year?