So you know, you can take tons and tons of pictures you love...but lets be honest... the best part? Sharing them! For me as soon as I find myself with a picture I like. Something pleasing to my eye and soothing to my artistic side, the first thing I want to do with it is share it. Recently I had a photo featured on a website I have been digging lately. The website is www.viewbug.com, its free to join and it has contests that are free to enter (and yes, there are actual prizes!) of course you can also pay to be a member and that lets you have access to more contests, and of course...those have better prizes. For now I just keep aiming to win myself a free membership ;)
So tonight I started looking around the internet. I have decided to start putting my work out there and seeing what competitions sounded good. There are a lot of places to put your work out on the line. feedback is great, why not?
So I made a new photographer friend and he turned me onto a new software program. Like photoshop, it's an Adobe product. I've been trying it out and I must say...so far it rocks. There are some things I still use photoshop for, but then I find myself finishing up with Lightroom. I give Adobe Lightroom my 110% seal of approval! I used Lightroom on the photo above of the seagulls and lake in my back yard. It really helped make the colors pop. and I did use the vignette options to darken the boarder and draw your eye in. Lightroom allows you to manipulate colors in a more precise and quick way than Photoshop. I was able to give the water a crisp blue that, to put it bluntly, did not exist in the original raw image. balancing color, saturation, hue, etc... can be the trickiest part of editing an image. It does not take much to overdo it. Knowing when the tweaking is right and most appealing is tough. I have worked on an image only to come back later and decide it ended up awful. I've learn on some photos to step away, come back, and re-access what I've done and what my goal is for the picture. Sometimes knowing what my goal is doesn't mean that the end result was what I had first imagined. I have found some of my favorite pictures happened entirely by accident, playing around and trying new things. I have not had the opportunity to try out some of the free websites that offer photo editing. Feel free to comment and share your experience with such sites. I hope to try them all and give feedback on which ones I liked the most.
Well, short and sweet as it is late. Going to try and get out shooting sometime soon. I'm feeling inspired! :)
Happy shooting!
