~fun with photos~

This is the photo after editing

and this is what it looked like before

The above photo was cropped, changed to sepia, auto contrasted and colored, saturated, and text added.  My absolute favorite part of blogging is playing around with my photos.  There are many photo editing programs available.  I use Picasa.  Lately I've been experimenting with cropping. (see below)

The subject (in this case the pear) doesn't have to be in the center of the photo.  Think of the picture in shapes.  By cropping it this way, I created two "triangles".  If you took a pencil and drew a straight line from the upper right hand corner of the picture down to the bottom left hand corner, you would have two triangles.   The left triangle is mostly space, while the right triangle is filled with the image.

You can also imagine your photograph as a tic- tac toe board.  Try putting your focal point (the part of your picture that you want to draw attention to) on ONE of the four corners of the middle square where the tic tac toe lines intersect.

Here are three photo taking tips that I follow:

1. Take LOTS of photos and then DELETE, DELETE, DELETE until you are left with only the best.

2. Shoot in natural light without the flash whenever possible

3. Edit, Edit, Edit

A friend once told me that she only keeps good pictures of herself.  She said, "If I'm not happy how I look in it, why should I hold on to it!"  That philosophy has helped me weed out a lot of bad photos over the years~and not just of me.  If you don't like a picture, don't be afraid to get rid of it!