the rain is good for something

when i grow up, i want to be one of the gardeners at legoland. that must be a great job.

thank you all for your thoughtful thoughts on my previous post. i've gotten much less angsty about the whole photo editing thing. as a number of you said, photos have been manipulated since they began, it's actually an integral part of the medium. we're just fortunate to live in a time where we can sit at our computers and do it and not have to putter around in a basement darkroom (tho' one of those appeals as well).

spud brought up an interesting point about it being a bit of a cheat to use someone else's Lightroom presets.  i found myself thinking about that quite a lot of the day. then i realized that i use products of other people's creativity all the time - recipe books, sewing patterns - but what i produce with them ends up something uniquely mine. i see the LR presets as no different than that - after all, the photos i apply them to are my own. at the base of it, i'm a pretty pragmatic person and i don't see any reason to reinvent the wheel. so i thank whoever it was who made that oldskool preset i love so much these days  (tho' most of the flowers above are a new one i found called PH bedtime).

and here's to the beginning of a beautiful week....

rainy day photo manipulation

original - SOOC
those lines you can see are a reflection of the wall behind me in the window that's between me and the rain.

during the time without internet (of which we speak only at a whisper) i had some time to play around a bit more with Lightroom (i'm not so much a photoshop girl, you see, so LR is as close as i come). and although some part of me still feels there's a measure of dishonesty in manipulating the photos, i'll also admit i had a bit of fun. and i learned something about how applying presets (i haven't made my own yet, it's not gone that far) can give a photo a different mood, one which helps you express what you'd like to express with the photo.

this morning, we woke up, once again, to a steady, drizzling, cold rain. it's been cold and dreary for what feels like weeks now and it's just so depressing, even tho' the world is a brilliant green and the flowers are blooming their little hearts out. what i'd like more than anything is to spread a cheery tablecloth on that table out there, get out the chair pillows and serve some cold, refreshing homemade rhubarb fizz. but alas, it's far too cold and rainy for that.

SarahJiDriftwood preset

somehow, this photo treatment makes me feel a bit better about that rainy scene. it has an early 20th century feel to it, like looking out on another time and that somehow makes it better. tho' i still picture sitting out there at the table, with this one, i've got more of a flapper dress on and perhaps a smart beaded headband and i'm definitely smoking a cigarette in one of those elegant holders (and i'm not even a smoker) and sipping a martini. the preset changes the whole mood of the photo and opens a whole new realm of imagination.

Hoddo_blue/yellow preset

this one isn't that far off the original, but it's just far enough that to me it has more depth. the greens are a bit more blue and i feel just that much more longing for the weather to clear and let me sit outside. the darker tones make the table just that much more lonely without me out there. it's closer to what i wanted to express when i took the photo. should i have made these adjustments in camera when i took the shot? perhaps.

what do you think about photo manipulation? is it simply a part of finishing our photos and making them our own? or is it cheating?

kristina wrote about this recently(ish) and you should check her post, as she goes much more into the technical aspects of using Lightroom, as well as asking the "what is real?" question on a more philosophical plane.

i'm all about the direct positive

tangobaby made me download a trial copy of lightroom 2 (i apparently have no will of my own and am generally weak in the face of gadgetry and pretty software). so today i finally really played with it.

it's heavenly.

and so are my MOO cards, shown here after a little direct positive treatment.

so heavenly that i ordered 3 new sets today for different purposes. because i'm a girl with a lot of purposes, why do you ask?

and here's what you can do with lightroom 2...

original:

there was a time when this would have made me perfectly happy

but then i found out about antique light:

and cold tone:

imagine what will happen when i start making my own presets...

but first, i'm off to oslo.

* * *

but speaking of directly positive, get yourself over to borneochica's blog and read her post about how she's going to gather books and donate them to teachers in chicago. i sent a box of them her way yesterday. if i can do it, so can you, mine have to cross an ocean and all. :-) she called me a rock star when i did it. you too can be a rock star, i'm sure.