Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Late Fall, down by the River…
One never knows where one will end up on any particular day here in the Big Windy. Traveling along with me is a tiny pocket cam that can be witness. It is slightly better, IMHO, than a phone cam (on my ancient Blackberry 8330 curve), but I had to try it out a little to get the feel for it. Even though today’s cameras have really big pixel properties, they still can only gather the info on the tiny little chip that lives within. So, to honor its pixie-ness, I set the resolution of my pictures to a lower setting than what was the highest available on the menu.
Then I played a little.
This is something my profs at SAIC might’ve called “Chees-Whiz”! Que? I took a perfectly decent low-light picture under the Congress Parkway Bridge, posterized it a little and painted on it. Eh, sometimes, whiz rules!
IMHO, no picture is 100% ready right out of the cam. There’s a lot of discussion about this and in the photog world especially riling is the magazine work that appears to have no post-pro done whatsoever, but are just wonked into the layouts bare-naked right out of the box, right off the CD. Que? Weird, because all pictures can be balanced a little, then sharpened, etc.
I even found a cool app online that does pretty thorough editing that you can then upload to many other apps. It’s called Picnik and I’ve been experimenting with it a bit. You can color balance, sharpen, it even uses histograms and curves! I love curves!
But my mainstay is still Photosop. Here’s a couple of straight pictures, with a little color balancing, sharpening and a small border on the first one.
The area down by the River along N-S Wacker Drive is especially intriguing.
Not too many people go there, even though it’s planted with lovely trees, and grass and has a walkway. This is 1/2 block down from the Sears Tower and it is weirdly peaceful in spite of the traffic looming above on the bridge or the hectic pool of people with targeted agendas in the Financial District real estate it shares.
I love that about the city; you never know when you’re going to come face-to-face with pocket of balm, an oasis of calm, and I love recording these little slices to muse on later, when my brain might need a little stroke to get it on track. Fall light is the absolute answer.
Hadn’t heard of picnik so will check that out but I do love the new Photoshop and all it’s new tools. Love your photos.
I don’t disagree that every photo could use some work out of the camera. I tend to feel somewhat lost with what to do.
You do take the best pics, Bonne. I need to learn more myself….
I use Picnik, though mostly to remove red eye. I haven’t paid for it, so there is a limit to what I can do with the free parts of the app.
Oh boy, the trees look supernatural. Great pictures. There’s a version of Piknik on flicker as well; it makes me and my Ravelry pics look decent.