Tuesday, June 26, 2012

My Newest Passion

I have a new passion. Of course that doesn't mean my passion for nature has lessened. My new passion compliments and enhances my passion for nature. What I have found and am enjoying so much is photo editing. The best part is that it inspires me to take the best nature pictures I can.

You've already seen some of my work in many of my other posts. I can't say that I'm great at it yet, but I'm improving. Maybe one day my stuff will be beautiful. For now I'm trying out many different little techniques.

For instance, with the picture above I tried to get a bit of a fantasy feel. I always liked the original picture, but I always imagined the scene closer to what I did with it now. Now I see it with magical creatures hiding behind every tree and bush. click on it to make it larger if you like.

The picture above is the original photo. you can see that it was a nice enough scene when I took it. I imagined it as a look into a secret fantasy world. The problem is that, like so many other good photographs I've taken, it fell just a bit short of that in my eyes. I wanted a way to capture what my imagination saw.

Have you ever had a dream of being in a far off place or maybe a fantasy land?  I think of things like that all the time. That's why I like to edit these pictures. Some of you may like to travel. A few of you may even pick up and move to your ideal place in the world. There are Apartments for sale In Turkey if that's your kind of thing.

I like different environments and times of day too. For example, I took this picture above right before a huge thunderstorm. I've always thought that it was a beautiful picture. The quality of light was special when I took the picture. The camera was able to capture that just a little too.

Honestly, after looking at the picture after resizing it for the blog, I think I like this upper one every bit as much as I like it after I did my edit. The full size picture I edited showed a more noticeable improvement. I guess that's the price I gotta pay when I'm trying to save space for this blog.

Now here's the picture after I did a little bit of editing. This technique works really well on pictures of people. I learned this one on a Gimp message board. It makes pictures look similar to the super sharp pictures that National Geographic has. When I used it on this picture, it made it so clear that I felt almost as if I could walk right into the picture.

That's about it for my talk of editing pictures this time. I haven't given up any of my other passions for this. And who knows? Maybe I'll get bored with doing a lot of this as time goes on. But maybe I'll get much better. It's just something fun to do while I'm home.

I'll be back next time with something of which I have no idea yet. How's that for an ending?

7 comments:

  1. ah yes, I understand your new passion completely. I was bitten by the editing bug several years ago an I'm completely in love with it.

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  2. Photo editing is good for those rainy days or snowy days when you can't be outside hiking. :)

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  3. These are some really nice effects! For her own photo blog, my human often puts the pictures through several different filters, layering them until she gets the mood she is looking for.

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  4. I like photo editing too, and spend way too much time playing around. These two photos of yours are just beautiful. They have a bit of fantasy feel to them.

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  5. Never given it a try, I do dispose of a lot when not what I wanted.

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  6. The way you are totally transforming the pictures is amazing Ratty. Your photo have always been really good....but this way you are making them uniquely yours...and it's great!!

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  7. My friend Elaine does a lot of photo editing too. I don't seem to have the patience.

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