Photography & Digi-scrapping

Tara commented on some of my pictures from my last entry. My mom got me a nice "real" camera for my college graduation gift and things pretty much took off from there. I resisted a digital camera for a long time, turning my nose up in disdain, claiming that nothing could replace the love affair I had with my Nikon. A few years ago, my husband finally talked me into it just so we could easily send pictures to the grandparents. Thanks to a really good salesman at Best Buy, we walked out with a lot more camera than we went in intending to buy. I have to admit that as anti-digital as I was, it was only a short time before I was hooked. The appeal of being able to snap off hundreds of pictures with no regard to film or developing cost is undeniable. I still don't think that digital photography replaces traditional film shooting, but I have come to respect it for its own sake. Sure, I Photoshop, but I'm here to say that even the most tedious of editing isn't going to fix a shot that simply isn't there.

The flower shots from the last entry are basically untouched, I just cropped them. The day was perfect (overcast) and the subjects beautiful. They didn't need any help.

I will give a few examples of what I do like using Photoshop for (actually, I use PSE, it is a fraction of the price of full PS and still ample for everything I do as a amateur photographer and for my digital scrapbooking).

I wanted to scrap this shot of Jeff helping Jessi eat cotton candy at a picnic we went to, but as cute as the picture is, I find those people in the background distracting. Since I couldn't rent the park for my own private photo session, I just made them "poof" and be gone. This shot is much more scrap-able.

I wanted to use this shot of giraffes at the zoo on a block-puzzle (I'll blog about that sometime) but it obviously needs a little help.

So, I cropped, brightened, and most importantly, got rid of the buildings in the backgroud. Was I at the zoo or on safari? I'll never tell!For this, I took a simple shot from the front yard and put Joyana in a studio.

Well, I intended to talk about digiscrapping as well, but I think I have more than enough photos in this entry. I'll do some examples of my layouts in another post.