To help with the mundane lifestyle that can go with having a chronic illness, I decided, well over a year ago now, to learn how to take decent photos by joining a class. It's a pretty basic one where simple topics are covered without going into too much depth. Just enough to get me really excited and actually think about what I'm capturing rather than just wasting precious memory space by taking crap photos. This class also includes learning basic photoshop skills; my favourite is the clone stamp where you can remove unwanted objects, or bits of objects, and replace them, with varying degrees of success, with a uniform background, for example. Some of my best attempts at this include removing a car, yes a whole car, from a beach scene, bollards from the main square in Krakow and annoying bits of grass in front of my brother's face.
Anyway, my project for the next couple of weeks is hunting out old digital photos and enhancing them so they're of good enough quality to print and frame, ready to go on my wall. I've been working pretty solidly on this for a couple of days now and, so far, it's staved the boredom. One of the first things I do, and I work pretty logically when it comes to this, is adjusting the levels. This means that in an underexposed photo it's sometimes possible to retrieve details that were lost in darkness. I came across one of my favourite photos, but it was far too dark, so much that only slight highlights in the faces were noticeable. I set to work. I discovered a whole other photo hidden in the darkness, one that has made me smile and laugh at the memories. I love it! It's assured a space on my wall.
It got me thinking.
What would life be like if we could photoshop it? Would it perfect? Would it be brighter? Would it be enhanced, or manipulated so much that there's no trace of the original? Would it be a botch job, full of obvious patches? Would it be a little monotonous, considering everything would be so good it had become the norm?
I love taking pictures as well, and I swear I get it from my mother, haha. Theres just something about capturing a moment in time that makes life easier for us disabled folks, I think. I spend a good deal of my down time reminiscing and smiling at the memories I have made. I wish I had the ability to print and frame all my favorite photos right now, I'd plaster my walls in a montage of photography. Haha! Good luck on your class, enjoy it! :)
ReplyDeleteYep, I agree.
ReplyDeleteI first got into it after my first really bad, 7 months solid flare. I remember going to the doctors', along the road I've been down many times before, and noticing how beautiful it was. 'It' being outside in general ;) I loved the way the light was hitting the hills after leaving the clouds a certain way, the subtle colour differences of the grass and the trees. Trees! How amazing.
(And it's pretty cool to have someone from BYDLS reading... never thought that'd happen!)
Remind me to put some of my photos up here. I've been threatening to for ages.
You definitely should, I'd love to see them. I also really don't get on BYDLS as much as I should. Its mostly facebook spoonies or Blogger for me, so when I can add someone I do.
ReplyDelete