I haven't been writing much on the blog because I have been focusing quite a lot on editing photos. When I am at the PC, every hour or so I add a photo to my collections of Paris and London
I feel quite pleased, especially at the Paris set. Photography gives me so much pleasure. What you see the is the end of a journey, sometimes literally.
Why I take photos, I don't really know. Perhaps a silly question, just about everybody does. I suppose for most of us, it's to tell a story. Photography is an artform, but I see myself as a craftswoman rather than an artist. I don't like artifice. (But nor do I believe the camera never lies). What you see is what you get. All of those photos have benefited from crafts, such as zooming in, and cropping out; the stained glass window is a triumph of colour management in the editing software. But anyone could take any one of the last three photos by being in the same place (in the same weather conditions for the bollards in particular); the Arc de Trimphe could be easily replicated but for a different configuration of traffic (I suspect there will be a lime green open top bus, though!).
It's only in the past couple of months that I have been using my camera properly. I bought it six years ago and have been using it as a glorified point-and-shoot. I have finally been taking photos in RAW, which meant splashing out on an editor which can handle RAW photos. I had baulked at the cost, but I've been using my 'entry level' software for so many years. If I get the same service out of the new one I'm using, it will have cost me a penny a photo, nothing compared to the cost of film-based photography! The combination of the two factors have left me feeling a bit warm inside.
Talking of old-fashioned photography, last year I combined watching the Olympics with scanning my old photographs into digital form. Having saved them as jpegs, I am wondering whether I should repeat the process but save them in a different form (Advice please).
I am going through them slowly editing them and selecting the best to publish, here or on Facebook, depending on the subject matter. A normal person would have started in 1984 and got stuck at about 1991, but I'm not normal, so I do a few from each year before moving onto the next year!
USA and Canada 99 1990 1989 Me myself I
I feel that the best photos have lost something in the scanning process. However, it's been nice to give some new life to a few by fiddling with the lighting, or colour, or cropping out extraneous rubbish.
