day 19: the super moon!

has anyone been out to check out the super moon this lovely evening? i have, and it's amazing. it brings back memories, because the last super moon i saw over the eiffel tower in france (miss that place). i heard that the peak would be around eleven thirty tonight. so if you live on the east coast, you've got just about a half an hour to make your popcorn and grab your lenses!

i really wanted to post one with a moon flare, because i am pretty well obsessed with flares of any kind in pictures, but this one came out a bit better than the ones with moon flares (a green dot in the picture that some would probably say, "oh! a UFO!" now you know where the tabloids get their pictures. jk. they don't get them from me).

and, side note, i saw a porcupine today! so cute! he lives under our shed, which my pops is NOT impressed with.

let's talk photo shop

I'm an amateur with a passion for capturing the things I see in this big world. I'm a super-amateur in the photo editing world.

But I'm trying to hone my skills. In Photo Shop particularly. When I first started taking pictures, I thought Photo Shop was super boring. Why did people rave about it so much? I wondered. There were too many complicated things about it and the only thing I actually liked about it was the fact that you could add a lens flare.

Well, very very VERY recently I've started using it for a lot more than adding watermarks. I went on a Picasa and Picnik craze for quite a while, and that's what I used, for the most part, to edit my brother's wedding pictures, because, for one, it was super easy to use and it had lots of cool effects (that I thought Photo Shop didn't have).

Then one day, when I was opening a picture to edit in Picnik, I nearly went into a major depression when I saw the notification that Picnik, like Ringo, is going away for good (I still miss Ringo. It was the bomb).

Well, I begrudgingly thought, I'll have to start figuring out how to use this Photo Shop more. There were LOTS of sighs on my end over this. Photo Shop is SO boring, I thought.

Well, they say change is good (still arguing that one), and this time, it's proved to be true. I've started to figure out new tidbits (there are all the same features on Photo Shop and you can play around with the effects even more than Picasa), like how to cross process a picture, blur objects, and, my personal favorite, which I discovered last week, the history brush tool. ITS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.

I've drunk the Kool-Aid. I've become an addict. And it's Photo Shop for me from now on.

So today I'm going to show you some befores and afters. I hope you like them.

this is the original, unedited picture.

This is the one that I originally presented my brother with. I added a lens flare because I thought it was "cool"

I figured how to take out the annoying minivan in the background. It wasn't quite finished yet, though.

Behold! the finished product! I absolutely love this picture. (And so does my brother. Which is MOST important)