Beyond Beyond 15

The theme for this week’s lesson was I Collect. Kim Klassen showed some of her collections of photos, books, and memorabilia dropped artfully on the floor. I chose to instead quickly drag out some of my family memorabilia that I have acquired over the years and arrange them on top of the old dental cabinet where they normally reside inside drawers.  During the two years that I did a Project 365, almost every item pictured here was featured on my blog.  I am an avid family genealogist and lover of all things antique and am now, in my later years, trying to figure out what I really want to keep (everything in this photo, for sure).

The other part of the lesson was to ponder our STYLE in photography. I’ve seen this topic bandied about on the Clickin Moms forum; I think it is probably more of a big deal when you are a pro. For me, I know I like bright colors AND black and white photography AND strong compositional elements.  I rarely like haze and matte processing in my own images, except in some of my lighter floral photos- but I like it in the work of others.  I love landscapes- but don’t feel particularly competent in achieving the look I admire in the work of other photographers.  I’m not too worried about finding my style, but hope it is evolving as I learn.

Photo processing notes: Although I didn’t do anything special photographing the little scene above (tripod, door open for light), I did try something new in processing after doing my basic edit. I used a free “hand-tinting” preset from OnOne software (I have their Perfect Effects 4). What it did was convert the photo to black and white, but bring back anything that was colored brown (by desaturating blues, greens, etc). I chose this preset, because I didn’t like the blue color of the writing on the Hopalong Cassidy mug in the cabinet amid the brown tones of the image. So basically, almost everything was left in the brown tones except the mug-  easier than using an adjustment brush.  In Photoshop, I stretched the canvas as we learned in a previous lesson and added a texture to just the bottom section.