A Professional I Am Not

You know what’s funny? How I’m all, “Ooooh, look at me, I’m so fabulous, and look at my photos, and listen to what I have to say about photography while I attempt to impress and amaze you and put some of my favorite pictures on this site”. Only I didn’t realize until I posted the photos, that I compressed the images to “low quality” to save on space, and HA! The pictures I’m posting are total crap!

If looking at pixilated, blurry, dull, discolored images of my children doesn’t make you want to sit up, sharpen your pencil, and with baited breath write down every single thing I say …. Well, I just don’t know what will possibly inspire you. And if you’re sitting back thinking, “These are your best photos? THIS is the best you can do???” yeah, you sort of have a point. Just trust me that in true 4x6 (or larger) high-quality format, these photos are actually pretty decent.

Photography suggestion #2:

Get your hands on some sort of photo-editing program, learn how to use it, and utilize it for all its worth. This is definitely a case of me, NOT practicing what I preach. When I bought my camera, it came with a free copy of Photoshop Elements, which is known as the “poor man’s” photo editing program. It’s sort of the red-headed step-child of Adobe Photoshop, the higher quality, more-bells-and-whistles photo editing program that many pros and quasi-pros use. A few of my friends who take pictures, Lisa and Erin, use Elements, and they can do some amazing things. Like Pioneer Woman says, a good photo editing program can make a good picture great, and make a great picture phenomenal.

Is it cheating to use a computer program to sharpen the focus of a flower, or blur your background, or make a neat photo collage, or turn the sky more blue, or erase a stop sign in the background? Who cares??? As far as I’m concerned, learning the best way to tweak your photos on the computer takes just as much skill and practice as learning to take great pictures in the first place. To me, photo editing programs are sort of like pain relief during childbirth …. It’s there, and available, you might as well USE it!

I have the better version of Photoshop in my possession, just haven’t taken the time to load it onto my computer and play with it. Even the older version that I have, I don’t utilize the way I should. I use Elements a LOT, but only to do basic stuff. I crop and zoom almost all my photos so I have exactly what I want in the frame. I also use it to adjust the brightness and contrast of a lot of pictures, an attempt to get more light in a shot without washing out the subject. Occasionally, I’ll get really adventurous and clone and stamp a distracting object out of the background, or change the color of someone’s shirt, or try to brighten the color of someone’s eyes. I’ve added neat borders and text to images … I’ve erased a blemish or two, and TRIED (unsuccessfully, I might add) to remove the spare tire around my middle. All of these things are really cool, but also time-consuming to learn and get good at. Like so many things in life, I want to be better at it, and should spend more time practicing it, but something more important always seems to come up, like watching Celebrity Fit Club, or flossing.

Again, for a much, MUCH better faq regarding photo editing programs, and photography in general, go to Pioneer Woman’s site. She has a “More about my camera” link on the left hand side of her page that is very helpful. One of these days I’m going to sit down with the Photoshop Elements books she was kind enough to send me, and learn how to use this program properly. And then, spare tire, watch out!

In the meantime, here are some more {crappy quality} photos that I love. I have these photos saved on my desktop, and they are some of my favorites. I just wish I knew all of you in person, so I could show you my scrapbooks and convince you that really, truly, the pictures look much better in person than they do compressed way down on this screen. Next time I’m uploading so many pictures, I’ll not be so chintzy with the hard drive space and spring for HIGH quality images.