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. 

These are a few random shots I took over the last week as I went about my life, it is amazing what you can find to photograph if you just keep your eyes open.  I came out of the art supply store the other day and noticed the little old tractor sitting in the corner of the parking lot.  They are using it to plow the winter snow.  It was old and decrepit but somehow it appealed to me.  When I finished taking a few shots I turned around to walk back to my car and saw the two little birds having a wonderful bath in the puddle on top of the dumpster.  I know that I could have made the color of the birds brighter with Lightroom but since I won't have access to it again until the end of the month I can't right now and I thought they were too cute just as they are not to share. 

Downtown Vernon boast one of the largest outdoor public art galleries in Canada.  Twenty-five amazing murals, some as large as 300 feet long and 40 feet high, depict the history, culture, scenery and folklore of Vernon.  They are on a number of large civic buildings such as the post office, the side of the big box office supply store and some are even hidden in back alleys and are hard to find.

I could probably do three or four posts on these murals alone there are so many and I will likely do more in the future but yesterday I drove around town looking for some of the hidden gems, the ones on the sides of parking lots, hiding in the back alleys and even on the side of one of the local tattoo shops.  A lot of these photos are taken at quite an angle because they are in alley's and that is the only way I could get a large part of the mural in the photo. I didn't edit these pictures at all so they show piles of snow and cars parked next to them.  I wanted people to see them how we as residents see them as just part of the local scenery.  Although truth be told us locals get so used to seeing them we don't even notice them half the time.  It wasn't until I went looking for them yesterday that I actually noticed how many are out there and how beautifully they are done, of course the photos don't actually do them justic.

 

These are photos from an afternoon drive I took a week ago.  The lighting was perfect, there was a lot of blue sky but the sun was covered by a thin cloud layer making it a lot easier to get good lighting in my photos. 

I have edited all of these photos by adding texture and a couple other effects using Photoshop and Picnik.  I know the first shot has a little too much texture but I kind of like the way it turned out anyway.  I particularly like the last shot, for some reason I am drawn to shots taken on railways, maybe it is the linear lines I'm not sure but for some reason they seem to grab me.  This is actually the railway that services one of the local lumber mills. 

Every February here in town we have the Vernon Winter Carnival and accompanying that is the Balloon Fiesta.  I am not entirely sure what convinces these people to go up in these balloons in the middle of winter because it must be so cold up there but they do and I just happened to be driving with my camera beside me when they took off mid afternoon last Friday.  In case anyone is wondering yes, I did stop the car to take these photos.  The last photo wasn't edited in any way it just looks so much different than the others due to the sun being right behind the balloons.

These photos definitely did not turn out how I was hoping.  I had been trying out an OM Zuiko50mm macro legacy glass lens on my camera.  Basically these lenses were developed for the old Olympus OM film cameras but with an adapter can be used on the Olympus Evolt SLR cameras.  The only issue is that you have to shoot completely manual.  That is definitely a challenge for me.  When I looked at each of these shots in the display on my camera after taking them each one of them was in focus but when I downloaded them sadly the truth showed.

I was kind of drawn to the ethereal feeling of the photos so instead of just deleting the images I decided to try adding some film grain to them to see if I could make look like they were out of focus on purpose.  I used this really easy tutorial and altered the images.  I have to say I do kind of like the images that I ended up with, the soft, grainy look of them does appeal to me.  That I think is one of the wonders of photography, with all of today's technology we can make something of almost any photo.