New Things

My photography seems to be taking a long vacation over the winter months. I find it hard to get motivated to take pictures of anything right now. Snow hasn't been staying around for long so there have been no cool wintery scene shots taken; which in reality I'm pretty ok with because I've only had to brush snow off my car about five times and it's wonderful. But with there being no snow, everything looks dead, plain and rather boring.

One exciting thing has happened though. I managed to find a deal on adobe.com where I can purchase Photoshop CS5 Extended for 40 bucks. Yes, I just said 40 bucks. The program is normally 350, and even though I should be frugal and save up my money, I can't pass that deal up.

Getting photoshop will be so wonderful. I'm currently using Corel Paint Shop Pro X, which is from 2005, maybe earlier. It is a good program, but it's just outdated. Also most editing tutorials are for photoshop so I have to spend half my time figuring out what feature in paint shop pro will do the same thing as a photoshop tool. But Photoshop CS5 will have so many awesome tools, probably more than I will ever know about or know how to use, but whatever.

So while I wait for my transaction to get processed, I decided to attempt an instagram style effect on one of my photos using Paint Shop Pro. About 5 attempts and an hour later I finally got the dang thing to work.

[I went a little heavy on the contrast, but I was getting tired of messing with it]

Here is the original for comparison:

Anyway. New program. New editing capabilities. Exciting.

In two weeks I will be going to Boston on my spring break for a long weekend and I can guarantee photos will be taken and blog posts will be published. My winter hiatus from photography will soon come to an end.