I was going to talk about snow in this blog – the blindingly white stuff that crunches under your boots and melts on your tongue – but I’ve entered my first ever photography competition and been bowled over by Photoshop. The competition's website said they wanted digital entries with a creative approach or treatment, which means using a camera to capture the image but using a variety of techniques to edit it, which means Hello Photoshop.
As I didn’t have Photoshop – I do now, due to the love and kindness of someone dear to me – my friend Terry said to come round and he would give me some quick lessons. I selected seven or eight images and played with them, and I ended up choosing three out of those eight and submitting them in the categories Best Digital Landscape and Best Digital Abstract.
I had a lot of fun, and was gobsmacked by what you can do to a simple picture. And excited, too. So I’m sharing some of the before and after shots here.
One of my own personal rules dictates that I try as little as possible to interfere with the original shot, except in two instances, where I went a little wild.
The other example I can't show because I've submitted it to the comp.
I didn’t add things to the photos – no computer graphics, for instance – except for colour and contrast and something called temperature. I did, in one instance, take out a handrail. Simply rubbed it out, which was a weird feeling.
A good friend tells me that I make frequent use of vanishing points in my photography. I didn’t know what a vanishing point was, so Lesley explained how the lines in the photograph converge in the middle distance, and I see now that I do use them quite often. She wondered if my many photos of pathways/roads/lanes means that I am searching for something. I don’t know. I like to think rather that I am intrigued by the unknown, by what lies beyond. Do other photographers out there relate to this, to finding a theme in your pictures?
It’s fairly obvious how all this relates to writing. Get something simple or straightforward down and keep adding layers to it until you have a piece that is worth looking at or, in this case, reading. The trick of course is to get something down to start with...
Ah, well, back to the real world.
Great photos Kathy
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