Photo – Playing With Toys

Photography remains one of my favorite outlets for creativity.  When I started back in the dark ages, the creativity came in two phases.  Through the lens and in the darkroom.  I understood the darkroom concepts but never used them.  I trained myself to get the image in the viewfinder.  Not being able to afford the level of film expenditures that the pros used helped that way too.

While that’s great training, and one I recommend to every beginning photographer, it does still leave some options off the table.  Which is why the digital age has been such a boon!  Now darkroom options are available to everyone.  It doesn’t require a dedicated room, just a few pieces of software on your computer.

There’s still a learning curve.  And I’m enjoying puttering along the way.

Here’s a photo I took with my camera phone (an LG K20 PLUS, which I really like).  The brilliance of the leaf on the reflective surface caught my eye.

But it’s not perfect.  The tip of the leaf is out of focus and the interior of the car is too visible.  It’s distracting.

So I jumped into an app I picked up, Photo Painter (0.99 at Google Play), to see if I could improve the image.  The interface is easy to use and offers several options.  I chose the edit function which then lets me play with various styles (Impressionism, Realism, Expressionism, etc).  After fiddling with it a bit, I chose Expressionism.  And it gave me this:

This solves a lot of my issues.  The interior of the car is reduced, the sense of reflection is maintained and the edges of the leaf are much sharper!  Now, I suddenly notice the clear, non-reflective section at the bottom left.  It hadn’t bothered me before but does now.  That’s easy to fix!  Using my favorite photo viewer and editor, Irfanview (Free), I can quickly crop the offending section out.  The added value here is that it takes the leaf out of the center of the frame.  I think that’s a much better presentation.

So here’s the final version:

Is it lying in a puddle, or a pond, or on the windshield of a car?  It can be anything you want.  When I look at this one, I am very happy.  I took a grab shot and turned into something that makes me happy and proud.  Not bad.  Not bad at all.

 

All images are the property of J.D. Phillippi.  All rights reserved.

Copyright 2018