A New Day, A Different Way The creative and photographic endeavours of a woman trying to add color and beauty to her world.

One thing I have learned is that photography can be an expensive hobby.  Good lenses can be a fortune and photo editing software, printers and scanners can all add up really fast.  So today I thought I would do a post about economy photography and editing. 

These photos were all taken on our honeymoon two and a half years ago in San Francisco.  I didn't have a great camera, I have upgraded twice since these were taken, so a lot of these shots are a bit grainy.  I also hadn't spend much time taking working on my photography, I was basically just taking photos for memory sake so my composition isn't great on a lot of these shots.  Although perhaps I should mention that a lot of them were taken from the top of a double decker moving bus which didn't help either. 

I edited these photos using Picnik which is an amazing online photo editing program that you can access for only $25 a year.  It allows you to create all sorts of special effects and offers a variety of photo correction options as well.  So basically with a simple digital camera and this inexpensive little program you can still do amazing things with your photos.  Here are a few samples. 

This is one of my photos that wasn't very crisp.  I uploaded it to Picnik and used the Pencil Sketch option to give it this effect.  I have actually used this on other photos and then printed them out and painted them with watercolors.

The composition of this photo was not good, this was definitely taken from the moving bus.  I used Picnik to crop the photo and then added the Lomo-ish effect to the photo to give it more visual interest.

I like the composition of this photo but the colors were not what I would like so I added texture to the photo to give it additional visual interest and make the dull colors look a little more intentional.


This is another moving bus photo, this building was magnificent in real life but my photo hardly does it justice.  I used Picnik to rotate the picture to straighten the building out and then cropped out some undesirable tourist heads and then added the texture.  I think it makes the image far more interesting.