Day 49: Thursday, June 11, 2009

1: 

Surprise!  Actual new photos today!  Yay!  We had a big huge thunderstorm today (which happens, like, every other day I feel like), which caused the resulting sky to be absolutely GORGEOUS.  I didn't get any good shots of the sky, but I couldn't resist wandering over to the Nicholson's garden to catch a few shots of the water on the plants.  This is my life right now.  I get distracted while trying to go to Barnes and Noble and wander around taking photos for hours unexpectedly.  This time I only took pictures for a few minutes though, because it started raining again and I will NOT let my precious camera get wet. 

Also, on an editing note, I'm going to try to edit all new photos before posting them, so these are edited.  In addition, per your request Nate, let me tell you exactly how I edit them.  I almost don't want to say because anyone who was impressed will no longer be so.  Nevertheless, here goes.  All I do is I play around with 5 settings: Brightness, Contrast, Hue, Saturation and Sharpness.  Actually, I almost exclusively use Contrast, Saturation and Sharpness.  Actually, I almost exclusively increase those three.  Very simple.  I just go straight to those 3 settings and increase them until I am satisfied.  The end.  The program I use is "Digital Photo Professional," which came with my camera.  Yes, I have access to Aperture (the professional Apple editing software which costs hundreds of dollars) on my aunt's computer and yet I use 3 settings on the software that came with my computer.  Don't worry, I fully plan on expanding my editing knowledge over the next few weeks and months.  Any knowledge you'd like to share Nate?

2: In case you haven't noticed, I usually do extreme close-ups of the plants, because, well, I find those are easier for me to make look good.  However, I actually quite liked this not-so-close up one.

3:

4:

5:

6:  I would prefer the entire flower to have been in focus on this one, and probably would have gotten that shot had the rain not started while I was shooting it.  The focused part still looks quite neat though.