photo editing

A year ago, my Mom and I started taking photography lessons together. It was just an introduction course and we just learned the basics, but ever since then I like to pretend I'm a photographer. Sometimes I'll go out and see something that just gives me the urge to take a picture. So I'll usually bribe my sister with Starbucks and make her be my model for a couple hours. Lets be honest, introduction classes only get you so far. I don't care how beautiful my sister is, sometimes I can't make my camera capture the image I had in my head. That's where photoshop and photo editing come into play.


Last summer my family and I drove to Minneapolis, Minnesota for a shopping weekend for us girls, and so my Dad could check out an old car show. Beside our hotel was a tiny field with what I called wild flowers (but were probably really just weeds). I grabbed my favorite model, my sister, and made her sit with the bugs for an hour in the blistering sun while I snapped away on the camera. In my head, I pictured my sister in a wild flower patch in the middle of a secret forest somewhere. Instead what I got was my sister, surrounded by flowers, with the highway in the background. Needless to say, not what I wanted. By playing around with all the features on Picnik I created the image I couldn't get my camera to capture. 

(thank you Picnik for fixing this mess)

Although sometimes Photoshop and photo editing can save a picture, there's such thing as too much photo editing. For example, I have a favorite baby picture of myself. I'm in the backyard enjoying a orange popsicle (that looks huge compared to me) with a little ponytail on the top of my head in some bright neon overall outfit my Mom dressed me in (it was the early 90's, I can't really blame her). I played around with it on Picnik. First I made it black and white in an attempt to show it was an old distant memory.

Although the black and white definitely made the picture look older, it removed my favorite parts of the picture, the crazy colors of my overalls! Then I tried to leave the picture black and white but have the colors of my overalls and popsicle pop out. 

 The result is an Andy Warhol-ish pop art picture. Not what I wanted. Although it looks cool, I felt like it was still missing something. So I left the picture in it's original state.

There are definitely imperfections in the original. It's not exactly focused and the colors don't pop as much as they should, it's the imperfections that photo editing would make perfect, that make this picture perfect to me. 

Photo editing tools are definitely awesome. They can completely change your picture and make the picture tell a whole different story. But as with any good thing, there's such thing as too much. Sometimes the imperfections make a picture perfect!