On A Sunny Side Of Things

Every Friday a group of dedicated enthusiasts participate in an event called AfterBeforeFriday forum, hosted by Stacy Fischer on her blog Visual Venturing. There we share our before and after photos, accompanied by few words about our post-processing choices.

To be honest, most of my post-processing comprises of few basic things: cropping, adjusting brightness, contrast, shadows, saturation, temperature. Here and there I add dark edges, soft overlay or soft focal. Majority of changes are done through PicMonkey and PixlrExpress. I ventured few times into the world of GIMP, but I am still learning.

But I try to compensate my lack of expert knowledge in post-processing with my witty character and writing. I said I try, doesn’t necessary mean I excel in that.

After months of really lousy weather, we managed to have few days of sun. So, I jumped at the opportunity to take some fresh photos and spent the entire weekend outdoors. My dog Berta and I took a long walk by the river on a Saturday morning and I came up with some great stuff. As we were returning home, I spotted this row of chairs and thought I might get some interesting images. There I was, sprawled on a grass, trying to capture an interesting angle, providing a spectacular scene for the onlookers. After a few moments, Berta decided that I needed some help, so she crawled on her belly, pointing at the nearest chair. Few moments later she decided she was bored and that I was in a desperate need of her kisses. So she attacked me and smothered me with her ways of affection. That girl doesn’t take No for an answer.

As you can see, I made small changes, mostly by cropping and tinkering with exposure. I tried not to overdo it, to preserve the summer look of the scene. Unfortunately, while under the attack of my dog, I forgot to adjust ISO, so the image turned a bit too bright. That is a shame, because the sky was a spectacular shade of blue. I keep forgetting to adjust my camera and take dozen of images, before I realize they turned out too dark or too bright. But I am getting better at all those technical stuff. As I always say, small steps.

Good news is I have a plan. I set some of the goals over the winter months:
1.) Learn all there is about Canon550D. I just started to shoot with it, there is so much to learn.
2.) Learn more about photography principles. I learned a lot this year about composition, DoF, PoW and I think I am good with those. Need to learn more about the light and generally all about exposure.
3.) Replace my old PC, so I can finally install Photoshop, Lightroom and start learning about post-processing in a more complicated programs. I think I mastered the use of PicMonkey and PixlrExpress. Time for bigger things.

That’s it for this week. Hope you all have a nice weekend, full of happy moments. Go out, have fun, enjoy the sun. And if you have nothing better to do, you can always check out my latest very helpful post How To Survive Alien Invasion.

Edit!!!
I almost forgot the most important part! I flipped the image. 😀