My photoshop is not here yet. In reality it's probably a good thing because it's midterm week and I should focus on my classes. Yet it is still pretty disappointing, I got all excited last Thursday about purchasing photoshop and I'm still waiting for my license. I already downloaded the program, figured I'd get that out of the way.
But now it's just sitting on my desktop, taunting me.
Apparently proving you're a student for the education discount is a more difficult affair than I suspected. I attempted to submit my student email address as verification, but the site was on the fritz so I had to scan and email in my student ID and some form of school official document. When I went to scan my student ID I discovered that it expired last year(when I was supposed to graduate...ugh). I also don't keep spare copies of my transcript laying around. So I had to walk all over campus today to get my ID updated and my transcript printed. But they are scanned and emailed. Done.
Hopefully I will have it by 5pm Friday.
It shall be spring break then and I will have ample time to waste.
But since I don't have a shiny, new program, I spent more time in paint shop pro trying to do a vintage edit. Which I think turned out rather well.
This image sums up how I feel about this whole photoshop ordeal:
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 It is a good program, but it's just outdated.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.
Winter has finally visited Michigan land. Seeing as it is January 12th I probably shouldn't complain too much, but I'm going to anyway. Not a snow fan. It's just cold and makes my life more difficult. I do want to get out and take some cool winter shots, but it's supposed to keep snowing all night and I'd rather not risk any water damage to my camera so it will have to wait. So instead of putting on as many layers as possible and trudging into snowland, I just searched around in my room for something interesting to photograph. I didn't find much, but I had fun.
Clearly I've been pretty bad about posting since my last post was in November. In lieu of not actually taking photos, I've been doing a fair amount of reading about photography. Really gearing myself up to try out some new things. For a while I was getting slightly bored/depressed with my photography because I felt like I lacked equipment, but I've come to realize equipment doesn't make a photograph. I need to learn to work with what I've got and that I can still make sweet images without all the fancy tools. I've already read my camera manual more times than I care to count and I have a good understanding of it's capabilities. I just need to get out there and practice the techniques I've read about with what tools I have(basically a camera and a tripod...so much equipment...). I'm attempting to discipline myself to just take a picture of something. Tonight I was feeling pretty lazy and just wanted to watch netflix, but I forced myself to find something interesting in my room and just photograph it. This is not a new year's resolution, I don't do those. I just decided I needed to better myself in photography and this decision just happened to come around the same time. I think I'd actually blame my motivation on college. I'm in my last semester(whew) and I'm feeling very "Get stuff done"-ish.
Ok, now after all that stuff that you most likely skimmed through because you're thinking "Hey, I come to this blog to look at your pictures Erica, and not read whatever you are blabbing about."
Picture time:
(as always click on them to go to Flickr for a larger, better quality images)
[This picture is actually old. It's from my trip to Boston fall 2011, but I edited it recently and really liked the result and now that I'm finally posting, I can actually share it.]
[These are some hand-carved wooden dominoes that I got on a vacation to Aruba back when I was in high school and had braces...]
[One of the things I found in my room and decided to play around with was a slinky. In this shot I actually put the slinky over my lens]
[Slinky over the lens take 2]
[So while looking for cool things to photograph in my room it became clear just how five years old I am, because basically all I had was this slinky, action figures, legos and various toys. But I put this little clone trooper figure inside the slinky. It looks like my lens is in the slinky, but it's not, the small depth of field helped me get this look.]
[View from the top of the slinky]
[This is an adorable Jawa toy that Lee gave me. I nicely placed him in front of my Star Wars book collection.]
[This image better illustrates just how adorable this thing is. It cracks me up.]
Progress! I am making progress.
Now I want YOU to make comments. Comments!
And this wouldn't be a typical blog post if I didn't include some random thing from the internet that I find absolutely hilarious. So here is the man who is getting my vote in the upcoming election:
Then I also want to include a song by some guys I found this fall on youtube and I think they're just awesome. They cover songs using just piano and cello and they are fantastic. Generally I could care less about Coldplay, but this cover is sweet.
As per the usual I'm slacking on getting out and taking photos, which results in less posts. Of course the usual excuses apply: college, work, general life junk. Oh and it's getting cold outside. I'd like to say "I promise I'll get better at taking more photos!", but I know myself too well, it won't happen yet. Just in a slump.
Anyway. Today I went to a local graveyard to try something out. I had taken some pictures at this place before with a 35mm camera during my B&W film class, and I wanted to see if I could get the images to look the same if taken with a digital camera. Well of course that didn't work out because none of the stuff I photographed before was there now. So I just found a few other things to photograph. Not too many pictures as a result of my work today, but better than nothing. Did spend some time trying some different editing styles though.
[This image and the next one are the same, just different editing. I think I like this one more.]
[Same image again, but in black and white with a grain applied]
[Same subject, different shot... a little better composition than the first one]
[Previous image tonemapped. Watermark because its a trial program. Deal with it]
[Cool wreath]
[Cute little bear statue]
[Some other wreath]
[Trying to keep practicing taking images of larger subjects...]
