day 66: a self incriminating shot

hey folks. random fact about this girl. when i'm bored (and this happens OFTEN), i take self portraits. sounds vain, but i always make faces and it ends up making me laugh. silly, right? i thought so, too.

day 23: my desk (part one)

oh, dear, i almost forgot to take a picture today! that. would. not. have. been good.

but, haha, you still have to suffer through my mediocre photo a day challenge, until the day i actually do forget to take a picture.

i'm saying part one for today's post just because i have two desks; my computer desk, the desk i finished my high school and middle school papers on, and the desk i do most of my etsy crafts and shove papers into the many drawers of (it's a secretary desk).

what i learned from this shot:

i don't always like the color pop, surprisingly. i tried editing this one so that the only color was, you guessed it, the vibrant red of the coke bottle. then, i decided i liked the funky colored one instead. i adjusted the exposure a tad from the original overexposed pic and wound up with this:

i also guess i need to dust that filthy screen more often :(

Spotlight

I don't normally do the spotlight on pictures because it cuts out too much for my liking. But this picture was different. I wanted to focus the viewer's attention on the subject of the lighthouse, without all of the landscape in between the lens and the lighthouse distracting them. I hope you like it.

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)